


Every Mountain and Hill Shall be Made Low (Or: How Jim Kirk Moved a Mountain Without Even Trying)

by thalialunacy



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-14
Updated: 2009-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-26 15:48:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thalialunacy/pseuds/thalialunacy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Bones can see everybody's thoughts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Mountain and Hill Shall be Made Low (Or: How Jim Kirk Moved a Mountain Without Even Trying)

**Author's Note:**

> **Fandom** : _Star Trek_ reboot (w/ a few tiny TOS references)  
>  **Pairing** : Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy (theirloveissoallergyprone), secondary Sulu/Chekov & Spock/Uhura  
>  **Summary** : Bones is given a surprise gift by a space anomaly. And in German, ‘gift’ means ‘poison’.  
>  **Teaser** : _Oh sweet heavens to Betsy, he has_ not _just been hypothesizing the extent of his captain’s flexibility._  
>  **Length** : 22K
> 
>  **Warnings** : Author’s first _Trek_ fic. It turned out kind of like a Srsness Sandwich—drama smooshed between two thick slices of CRACK. I’m pants at science  & medicine, and most likely pants at this canon, as all I’ve got is the reboot and a vague memory of TNG. O AND IT’S A WHOLE PILE O’ DIRTY ~~POP~~ SLASH, NGL. Like, Severe Porn Warning _must_ be heeded. Including some het, but only a little. Also, I used anachronisms flagrantly, and severely abused the word ‘damn’ and all its variants.  
>  **Prompt** : Really, I didn’t write this. It was all in an EPIC prompt at st_xi_kink. Related Note: If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the prompt has already been filled once, and wonderfully so. No disrespect is meant towards that effort; my slut of a muse just went a little crazy when shown such a smexy plot. I tried to steer as clear as possible of echoing the first story, beyond the inevitable.  
>  **Disclaimer** : Obvious lack of ownership is obvious.  
>  **Dedication** : ~~TO CFINE WILL U PLZ MARRY ME OKTHX~~ For abigail89, my beloved internet!Mom, who doesn’t put up with my bullshit.

_Day One_

“The hell?”

McCoy’s mama raised him not to swear in front of children—and he doesn’t care that Chekov’s nearly twenty, he’s still so damned bright-eyed that it amounts to the same thing—but there the word goes anyway, swooshing through the air of Sick Bay, free as a bird. And there’s not even a life-threatening situation he can use as an excuse for his bad manners, either.

‘Make sure you eat a lot of protein in the next few days,’ is all he’d said. Then he’d gotten a distinct sense that he’d made Chekov homesick with this suggestion, as if the only thing Chekov knows that would fit the bill is some mighty Russian roast beast.

That’s not the weird part, though. He’s used to being able to— well— _feel_ things from people. To be a doctor, to be a damned _good_ doctor like he’s worked hard to become, you have to have a certain amount of ability when it comes to guessing what people are going through. You’ve got to be able to tell when they’re lying about how much pain they’re in, or how they _actually_ got that rash. It’s empathy, he guesses, or something that amounts to it, but he hates that creepy Betazoid bullshit so he just calls it being good at what he does, please and thank you.

Point is, he isn’t unused to being annoyed by little titters of emotions from the people around him, especially people he’s treating.

But usually it doesn’t involve _smells_.

And McCoy can sure as shit right now smell something suspiciously like stroganoff. Strongly, too, as if it’s right in front of him. As if Chekov’s hiding it behind his back. He has to keep himself from peering over the patient’s shoulder towards the other side of the bed.

“Doctor?”

He shifts his attention back to his patient. “Yeah?”

“Am I going to be… all right?”

“Of course, Ensign,” he says, trying to keep the worst of the gruff out of his voice. He’s like a baby chick, this Chekov. All peepy and fluffy and if you let him get rained on, he’ll get sickly and die on you. McCoy claps him on the back once, not too hard. “You’ll be fine. Just remember what I said.”

And the stroganoff smell comes back so strongly his mouth almost starts to water. It’s just so damn _real_ that his brain automatically slips into down-and-dirty problem-solving mode and tries to deduce a cause. He searches his memory quickly, flipping through his mental catalog of the past few days. But no, he himself hasn’t come into contact with anything he hasn’t touched a thousand times before on this voyage. So it’s got to be something else. “Ensign, I have a question before you go.”

The pale kid goes paler, if that’s possible. “Yes, Doctor?”

“We haven’t taken on any classified passengers in the past few days, have we? I mean, if so, the captain’s broken about fifty rules, but that only makes the occurrence more likely, now, doesn’t it?”

“No, Doctor, I’ve heard of no such things happening.”

“All right.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “Two questions, then: Did she—the ship—pass through or by any sort of… field, or planetary ring, or something of that nature, in the last, oh, thirty-six hours? Something considered innocuous by Starfleet classifications?”

Chekov’s eyes light up and McCoy sees him fight the urge to raise his hand. “Oh, yes! Yes, sir! Just forty minutes ago, there was a magnetic wave we identified as—“

“Save it. It’s too early in the day for physics. Thank you, Ensign. You’re free to go.”

Chekov scrambles down from the bed. _Gotta love this place_ , McCoy thinks as he watches the kid walk out the door, taking the noodley smell with him. _Every day’s like Halloween_.

He’s standing there, one arm crossed in front of him and one hand absently at his mouth, a million questions running through his head, when he hears the hiss of the door again. He looks up to see none other than Jim Kirk hopping up on one of the beds and pulling off his shirt.

“Nice,” he says shortly a few minutes later, after Jim’s presented the wounds and the pretty damn unlikely story. “Very nice, Jim.”

Kirk shrugs, then winces at the sting. “Believe me or don’t believe me, but it’s the truth, Bones.”

“You got five feet worth of scratches on your back from a dirty, distressed, orphaned baby koala. While you were on a secret away mission. In the middle of the night.” It’s almost too ridiculous to bother being sarcastic about. Almost. “And that’s the truth.”

“Yup.”

He rolls his eyes towards the heavens briefly, then leans in to smear an antiseptic on Jim’s clearly not koala-related wounds.

…and is nearly knocked over by the _smell._

“Goddammit!” he says hoarsely, holding the back of his wrist up to his nose to block the stench. It smells like absolute _shit_. Literally. Manure, horse stalls, flowerbeds, diapers, and a bunch of other images McCoy hasn’t thought about in a long, long time flash before his eyes, brought back by the once-familiar olfactory stimulation. “What the hell, Jim?”

“What?” the captain answers a bit warily, peering at McCoy’s hands and pockets as if a hypospray lurks just within.

McCoy’s brain scrambles around for a second, then draws the unexpected but correct conclusion. “Son of a bitch, you’re telling the truth.”

Jim straightens up indignantly. “I told you! Why don’t you ever believe me?” Then he shoots McCoy a look that’s part curiosity, part suspicion, part ‘I’m a bastard’ smirk. “Wait. Why do you believe me now?”

“Uh….” McCoy can’t quite answer that, not yet. “Just a hunch.”

Jim clearly ain’t buying it, though. “A hunch.”

“That’s right.”

“Uh-huh. Bones, you’re a doctor, not a psychic.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Yes, well, you can stop saying and just trust me, alright? I’m your goddamn doctor.”

Jim looks at him for a second more, then shrugs—which causes another wince as it pulls at his wounds again. “Bones,” he says through his teeth, clearly trying not to whine, “fix it.”

McCoy isn’t sure he can handle the godawful smell long enough to do so. He thinks fast, accepting the improbable even as he can’t quite believe it. “Uh… Sure, if you’ll… think about something else.”

“What?” Jim’s thoroughly confused now, and that’s no good, because he can get to be like a toddler if he’s feeling stubborn, asking ‘Why?’ and not taking ‘no reason’ or ‘because’ for an answer.

“Please, for the love of my mother’s apple pie, just think of something else.” He hesitates for a split second, then goes for the easy answer. All he wants is a quiet bay so he can figure out what the hell’s going on with his nose, and the scratches on Jim’s back are an angry red and he’s tired of looking at them. “Think of sex.”

Jim guffaws, once, but clearly the suggestion worked because when McCoy’s fingers come into contact with the torn skin, his nose fills with a haze of post-coital stink. He tries not to let his fingers twitch, but goddamn, it’s got to be an animal instinct, to be turned on at least a little by that smell. That smell of sweat, and dry mouths, and semen, and spit, and… and more semen.

Bemused, McCoy lifts his hands away from Kirk’s back casually, just a couple inches. The smell recedes to vague sweaty bodies. Then he smoothes an ointment-anointed finger along the next section of cut skin, and the sweat smell oozes into sharper tangs, which he can mostly discern from one another. Gym socks, other dirty laundry. Male ejaculate, that one’s easy to pick out. And beer, plenty of beer. Linens. Bedsheets, assumedly. Cologne.

A furrow develops between McCoy’s brows. There’s no flowery perfume, no baby powder bathwash, no vaginal secretions even, not that he can tell. Not exactly what he was expecting, that’s for damn sure. “You thinking about sex you’ve had, Jim? Or sex somebody else has had?”

He knows Jim’s smirking even though he can’t see the bastard’s face. “Why would I need to think about sex somebody else has had? Of course it’s sex I’ve had.”

McCoy has to admit there’s logic in that, which leaves him with only one conclusion to draw. A sour taste forms in the back of his mouth. “Alright, fine. Think about something else, then.”

“Like what?”

“Like…” Except that Jim already has, because yes, there it is, that ticklingly pungent, salty-sweet scent of an aroused woman. “Ah,” McCoy says swiftly. “Never mind, it’s fine.”

Jim swivels his neck around as far as he can, trying to get a good look at the doctor. He’s definitely suspicious now, and McCoy can practically hear that infamous brain tick-tick-ticking away. “What’s fine?”

McCoy clears his throat and finishes up the wound-cleaning. “This. Your back is fine. Or will be, very soon.” He turns away to retrieve the dermal regenerator, then passes it slowly over the affected area. The sex smell is nearly gone, thank Christ, but Kirk is still eyeing him. “Quit squirming and turn around. You’re worse than a kindergartner.”

After a moment, Jim grins and faces forward. “Geez, Bones, you tell me to think about sex, then you yell at me for squirming?”

“Poor baby. There, done.”

“I tend to think so.” He stands and stretches gingerly, testing the new bits. “So am I free to go?”

“Yes,” McCoy says, not giving a damn about how gruff he sounds now. “And when you do something stupid again tonight that reopens those wounds,” he warns as Jim dons the gold shirt again, “don’t come crying to me.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Jim grins and pops a mocking salute at him before sauntering out the door.

\---

Much to his chagrin, the fruits of the next few hours find him swearing in front of his Senior Medical Staff, Nurse Chapel, and the few patients that happen to be around.

He’d handed the sick bay over to his staff and ducked into his office—the one he’d finally decorated, sort of; there’s a picture of him and Jim from the Academy, a picture of Joanna that was out of date the day after it was taken, and a picture of his first prize-winning stallion—to do some research into whatever the hell was going on with his olfactory system doing overtime.

He hadn’t wanted Chekov to give him the details because he didn’t want to scare the kid unnecessarily, and it was all in the ship’s logs, anyway, but now he kinda wishes the kid was around, because he has all sorts of questions.

Questions the kid probably can’t answer, though, McCoy has to admit. According to the logs, nothing was amiss when it happened, and nothing was amiss after it happened. The ship just pushed through a field that the computer identified as an Alfvén wave. She was in it for less than thirty seconds, and all reports afterwards were clear. Kirk was thorough, too; he’d heard about this happening before, and he’d wanted everything checked and double-checked.

Plus, well, impenetrable starship? Hello? They haven’t had new _air_ in heaven knows how long, for love or money; how the hell could something as seemingly innocent as a magnetic wave fiddle so lovingly with his head?

And, come to think of it, why only his? He’d’ve thought other people would’ve come running in here by now.

Then he remembers the chip and curses aloud again, realizing only after the fact that it’d been a particularly vitriolic one he’d learned at Ole Miss. (And these walls? Not so thick, as the CMO needs to be able to come running for, well, just about anything.)

He’d _known_ getting that thing was a bad idea. And now he was paying for it. Perfectly safe, his ass. Then why did they only ‘offer’ it to CMOs?

Starfleet can _kiss_ his ‘perfectly safe’ ass, he thinks to himself as he drums his fingers on the desk. Once he figures out how to get rid of this new—and goddamn annoying—sixth sense, at least.

\---

“The _hell?_ ”

McCoy’s momma really _had_ taught him not to swear when there are ladies present, for the sweet Lord’s sake, but here he is, on the bridge, watching everyone’s eyebrows go up simultaneously like a goddamn circus troop at the words that just came out of his mouth.

But _they_ don’t have to deal with this shit, do they? No. They haven’t been smelling sex and lotion and alcohol and gym shirts and other people’s mama’s cooking all damn day.

And they most certainly didn’t just get attacked by three dozen different streams of language (all categorized and easily referenced, of course) while trying to hold a normal conversation with one Lieutenant Uhura.

Said Uhura is now looking at him like he’s going to get detention after school. “Pardon,” he mutters. “Will you excuse me for a moment?” She nods, and he pivots and walks away from her station. He pauses, per usual, next to Jim’s chair. “Can I have a word, Captain?” The last word is sort of ground through his teeth.

Jim quirks an eyebrow at him. “Uh, sure. Spock, you alright? I know this is strenuous flying, three hours in a straight line in warp, but—“

“Captain.” Spock and Kirk share a look. Bones scowls.

“Right.” Jim nods and turns to McCoy. “Shall we?”

Once the captain’s ready room door closes behind them, McCoy keeps as far from Kirk as possible. “Just—don’t come any closer.”

Jim is clearly amused. “Dare I ask why?”

“No.”

“Why?”

McCoy rolls his eyes.

“Fine. What’d you need to see me for?”

McCoy chews on his cheek for a moment. “Has anybody on the crew reported… anything unusual since we passed through that Alfvén wave during alpha shift?”

Kirk makes a mildly surprised face. “Wouldn’t they come to you with something like that?”

“Yeah. But you of all people know that sometimes the doctor is the last person to be informed.” He realizes after a second that he’s not getting anything… extra from Jim. Just a vague sort of hum. And suddenly he’s tempted to give a little test run of this newfound ability of his. He already knows what’s going on in Jim’s head, anyway, it being Jim, so what the hell?

He scootches forward.

He’s at least a little prepared this time. And he’s not surprised that what he gets from Jim is a cacophony, a zoo of words and images and goddammit, there’s that _sex_ smell again…

And in its wake zooms the ludicrous image of a mostly clothed Jim, half-perched on the desk in that very room, receiving what, if the look on his face is any indication, must be some of the best fellatio he’s had in his life. And the person giving it—well, McCoy can only guess it to be Yeoman Rand, by the looks of the gravity-defying blonde coiffure.

“Jesus, Jim.” He steps back and the image fades. He breathes a little easier.

“…yes?”

“Well.” He shifts his weight. “Nothing. I’ve… got to get back to sickbay.”

Jim eyes him for a moment. “Fine. You’ll report if anyone in the crew _does_ complain of anything relating to the anomaly?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay.”

And he swears the smell of sex follows him down the hallway.

\---

He notices in the mess a little later something he missed while he was having the minor meltdown on the bridge-- Sulu’s got a problem. The kid can’t sit down or stand up without pulling a face, and he might think no one notices the surreptitious rub he gives the small of his back, but McCoy’s trained to see those kinds of things. And he can’t not ask. It’s his damn job, isn’t it?

“Sulu.” The pilot looks up from his food, clearly schooling his expression to seem neutral and pain-free. “What the devil is wrong with your back?”

“My back, sir?” His eyes drop back to his fork. “My back is fine, sir.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me another one.”

Sulu’s eyes flash, but he clenches his jaw and stays silent. McCoy raises an eyebrow, then he decides hell, if he has these special powers, he might as well use them for good. He picks up his tray, moseys over to sit himself down right beside the now very twitchy pilot, and waits.

It’s almost instant this time. _Good God, more sex?_ The smell is there again, only this time it’s… sweet. Not literally, thank Christ, but McCoy suddenly has the impression this isn’t a Jim-style fuck-and-run, but actual love-making, in a monogamous sort of fashion. Which makes him feel better, because it means Sulu is unlikely to be visiting his sick bay for embarrassing diagnoses anytime soon.

Not that Kirk’s ever embarrassed. But he damn well ought to be.

McCoy’s thinking this over to himself, proud of the pilot for manning up and flying straight, when the image behind the smell floats into his vision.

Chekov.

It’s Chekov Sulu’s banging. Well, _making love to_ , if his instinct about the smell is at all on target. Which he’d be willing to bet money it is.

Except in this vision, their… copulation is a damn sight closer to the first expression, to be perfectly honest. McCoy can see very clearly now exactly how Sulu threw out his back, and it’s quite a feat, actually. For a second, he gets stuck on how that position is actually physically possible to maintain for _any_ humanoid, let alone a star ship officer. Well, Jim could probably manage it, he reasons, but he’s really very—

“Sir?”

Oh sweet heavens to Betsy, he has _not_ just been hypothesizing the extent of his captain’s flexibility. He pinches the bridge of his nose and tries to ignore the rise in body temperature he’s just brought upon himself.

When he looks up, Sulu’s narrowing his eyes at him—When did this whole damn crew get so intuitive? —so he barks out instructions immediately. “Sulu. Listen to me— I don’t care how it happened. I’m a doctor, I’m here to fix these things. Come to the bay directly before your next shift so I can get it taken care of. That’s an order, dammit.”

Sulu grimaces, but McCoy thinks he looks secretly thankful anyway. Back problems are hell, no two ways around it. “Thank you, Doctor.”

McCoy nods, and a mildly uncomfortable silence falls as they go back to the business of eating. The mental stream is still coming, of course. McCoy grimaces, then sets about trying to block it out. Success comes in fits and starts, but a number of thoughts jump into his head no matter how hard he tries.

Much to his relief, they’re not _all_ about the pilot’s proclivity for a certain young navigator. In fact, his general stream of thought is rather boring, at least to McCoy— It’s a whole lot of stars, planets, and more stars, and a lot of pilot-babble that he can’t understand, let alone bring himself to care about. The kid is a pilot down to his very marrow, it seems. Considering he pretty much holds their lives in his hands, McCoy’s okay with it. But it doesn’t make it any more exciting to be listening in on.

The bits about Chekov are far from boring, of course, but he does his best to ignore them even as they’re right in front of him. No need to go rubbernecking about other people’s private affairs, he maintains. No need at all. Especially when it’s so clear that two people are so totally ridiculous for each other.

And if someone were to suggest that, as he runs his tricorder over Sulu’s back a while later, he can’t help but wallow a little in a memory of waking up surrounded by a beloved, warm body, he’d deny it. But they’d be right.

\---

McCoy thought he’d hated meetings before.

Hoo-boy, had he been wrong.

Meetings before have been a walk in the park. A day of leisure. When compared to the torture he’s currently undergoing, meetings used to be a damn pleasure cruise.

Over the course of the day, through some miracle McCoy hates with every fiber of his being, his newfound talent—‘The Damn Curse’, as he’s started referring to it in his head—has grown, and is anxious to prove its worth even at further and further physical distances.

His first clue of this had been like a hit from a two-by-four shortly after his arrival at sickbay for the beginning of the beta shift. Nurse Chapel had nodded to him, per usual, and had given him her normal report on patient status before going off-shift. He’d totally had it under control, put in the effort to block whatever he could out of his head while she was within what seemed to be normal range.

Then she’d walked out the door, and he’d let down his guard— but heard it anyway. She was ten, fifteen feet away from him, and still, clear as the sun, he’d heard, ‘And maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell him I’m pregnant.’

He’d stared after her, too stunned to pretend to be busy, or, hell, to call her back or something. The ‘him’ intended clearly isn’t McCoy—he likes to think he maintains a work ethic, thank you very much, so he’s always put her firmly off-limits—but all the same, she’s one of his people, and she needs medical attention he knows for a fact she isn’t getting.

He’d spent the next ten minutes holed up in his office, writing and deleting messages to her on the subject, but eventually been defeated by his own old-fashioned sensibilities. He’d thrown the PADD down in order to go find something he could actually help with.

Only, he’d never really found anything—sometimes his bay ran far too efficiently for him to be useful—and one incredibly boring shift later, he’s stuck in this goddamn meeting, _wishing_ he could be back in that awkward moment, for the love of _God_. Wishing to be anywhere but here.

Six people in such close quarters means the whole thing is more insistent. There are only the six people in the room, yet in his head it sounds like six thousand. In countless damn languages and thinking an endless array of things. He’d probably find their mental tangents comforting, considering he usually feels bad for letting his mind wander during meetings, except that apparently everyone on this damned crew is having far, far more sex than he’s having.

And that’s just _aggravating_.

He spends the first few endless minutes trying to identify and separate the streams. There’s Uhura, pondering a new Klingon dialect she’s ferreting out of various transmissions from a period in history so boring nobody’s ever bothered before; nobody else would be thinking about that, for sure. There’s someone thinking about—Oh for the love of all that is holy, that must be Spock, and McCoy’s not even going to _try_ to understand what’s going on in that bastard’s mind. There’s gobbledeegook physics theorems punctuated by excited Russian, that’s nobody but Chekov. There’s katanas and really cheesy movie music, that’s Sulu. There’s Chekov and Sulu naked on a couch, that’s…

McCoy scowls.

“Bones?”

Oh, Christ. “Yes, Jim?” As he meets Jim’s eyes, the expected mental stream jumps out to dominate, and McCoy has to suppress the urge to put his head in his hands and moan. It’s like being inside a goddamn video game, and piss if he’s any good at those. Jim is all fast shiny vehicles and fast dangerous missions and fast hard sex, and it makes McCoy a bit dizzy.

Dizzier when he realizes the person Jim’s thinking about having sex with right now is Uhura. It’s disgusting. The kid is a pig. Uhura is permanently bonded with Spock, and will twist your nuts off in a second if you suggest otherwise, and the kid’s getting offers of sex every time he goes around a corner, but he somehow still can’t keep his mental dick in his imaginary pants.

“Are we boring you?” Jim has the biggest of smartass smirks on his face, and McCoy has the urge to hit him. Or stab him with an inoculate-filled hypospray.

“No.”

“No?” He looks at McCoy expectantly.

Oh, if that urge didn’t just get ten times stronger… “No, _Captain_.” He knows Jim knows he’s lying, but he doesn’t particularly care at the moment. He’s got too much else on his mind. So to speak.

“Glad to hear it.”

So the meeting continues. And McCoy spends the next forty minutes trying _not_ to notice exactly which position Uhura likes the best (from behind, of all things, which surprises him, coming from such an elegant woman, even though it shouldn’t, because women are strange creatures and he knows it well), or the fact that Spock has done _quite_ thorough research into the art of pleasuring a woman orally (Flutter tongue? The hell?), or _any_ of the disturbing things Scotty is thinking. (Hamsters? Really? It isn’t strictly legal to beam living creatures without their permission unless it’s for their health, and definitely isn’t legal to beam them _there_ … Although, actually, that might be fun for a little blackmail later, McCoy muses, so he tucks it away in his memory.)

He wants to put his hands over his ears and tell everyone to shut the hell up. But he can’t do that, now, can he? So he grits his teeth and does the best he can to get his brain to get them to shut the hell up instead. He tries thinking of it like a picture, like phaser beams or spiderwebs or—or neural ganglia. Yes. That’ll do nicely. He lines them up in his head and one by one tries to break the chains. It works, way better than the clumsy attempts with Sulu and Chapel, and he’s thrilled as the noise in his head begins to dim.

The only catch is that he can’t seem to drown out Jim. That chain clings together tenaciously, no matter how hard he tries. And oh Lordy, how he tries.

…and before he knows it, Kirk is nodding at them in dismissal. “We’re done here, ladies and gentlemen.” McCoy tries not to look too surprised that the meeting’s over already, but knows he’s probably failing. Apparently time passes quickly when you’re going quietly mad. “Bones, I know you weren’t listening to any of that, so you can stay after and I’ll run a recap.”

Goddamn son of a bitch is totally enjoying himself, but McCoy knows he’s licked. “Fine.” He sullenly watches Jim watch the others leave, and probably shouldn’t be stunned, but is anyway, when the image of Sulu and Chekov in a passionate embrace pops into his mind as they exit.

What the _hell._

He’d known Jim was, well, a bit of a Lazy Susan, but he’d not known the man dipped into so many pools of applicants for his mental aerobics. So to speak.

How many damned surprises is a man supposed to endure in a day, for pity’s sake?

“Jim, can we get this over with, please?” he grumps, trying to spit the image from his mind. And when Jim turns to him, it’s appears he’s succeeded, and Jim is thinking of duty rosters, supply requisitions, and other ship’s things, the things he’s relaying to McCoy. He has a feeling Jim’s going into more detail with him than he did in the general meeting, which almost makes him forgive the little shit.

…then Jim’s brain wanders, and McCoy’s head is filled with an incredibly detailed, incredibly _dirty_ image. Of course, he thinks, anything Jim does, he does with aplomb, so why should this be different?

His brain takes a second to process the picture fully, and when he does, that sour taste is back in his mouth. It’s Jim, clearly, naked as a jaybird… and being fucked—there’s no other word for it, McCoy realizes with a grimace—into the mattress by a man with dark hair. McCoy can’t see the mystery man’s face, but Kirk’s wearing such a distinct expression of pure animal joy, his mouth in a perfect rictus of pleasure and his hands gripping the man’s shoulders like he never wants to let go, that he kind of forgets to wonder.

For a second.

“Damn it, Jim,” he growls before he can stop himself. “Do you _always_ think about sex?”

Jim blinks, but doesn’t ask where this line of questioning came from. Thank God. “Well… sort of, yeah, at least in the back of my mind. Unless we’re, like, under direct attack. Or I’m with Spock.” A corner of his mouth turns up, then he gives the doctor a curious look and McCoy tries not to flinch at what he knows is coming. “Dare I inquire as to why you’re asking? I mean— doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?”

“Please.” McCoy hears that he’s inflected that one word exactly like his hillbilly cousins used to say ‘pshaw,’ and it makes him even grumpier.

Too bad Jim’s got a wicked glint in his eye. “Is it because of your advanced age? Can’t get it up anymore, grandpa?”

And suddenly the image flashes, changes, and McCoy nearly chokes— For now the picture is Jim kneeling in front of the same dark-headed man, his hand expertly coaxing a half-soft cock to utter alertness while his mouth alternates between taking a lick here and there and uttering words that, by the looks on both of their faces, are utter filth.

And McCoy has no trouble seeing exactly who the other man is. As much as he tries not to look in the mirror most days, he knows his own face far too well.

The _fuck._

The sour taste becomes nausea, and he feels his body temperature spike and his skin become clammy as he oozes slowly to his feet. He has to… get… somewhere. “Are we finished here, Jim?”

Jim looks up at him, a little concerned. “Yeah. You alright?”

“Fine.” He forces himself to look Jim in eye and speak smoothly, damn it, despite the stench of sweat and _his own_ semen in his nostrils. “I don’t appreciate the joke about my working parts,” he manages in a tone resembling his normal gruffness, “but seeing as I am a grown-up, and secure in what I do, I’ll just ignore it, and see you and your immature ass tomorrow.”

Jim shrugs and waves him off with a typical Jim grin. “Sure. The excitement of a totally non-dangerous away mission awaits. See you then.”

There’s a drink waiting for McCoy in his quarters, and he’s damn well going to have it. Good sleep and a stiff drink, that’s all he needs, right?

And then tomorrow, with the mission and them being so far away from the anomaly, everything will be fine.

Well, the thought is enough to let him get a few hours’ sleep, at least.

\---

 _Day Two_

Diplomacy is sometimes exactly what it’s cracked up to be, McCoy had thought after he had shaken his head free of post-beaming fuzz and looked out from the beam-down point.

The planet they’re visiting has some of the most beautiful rolling hills he’s ever seen, and the thriving metropolis that’s grown, where once just an outpost lay, is really quite impressive. It’s to be a day full of history lessons, tours of medical labs, and meals with heads of state, and he’s had worse places to be.

…or so he had thought. Then, first of all, it had taken him a good hour of conversation before he could buckle down and dim out all the streams of thought scampering into his mind from their hosts.

Second of all, once that’s accomplished, which isn’t, by the way, until halfway through their first meeting-turned-impromptu-history-lecture, one thing becomes disgustingly clear:

Jim Kirk’s mind tends to wander unless something’s in danger of blowing up. And when it wanders, it usually wanders to sex. And when it wanders to sex, it’s usually sex with the person in closest proximity.

Or at least, that’s McCoy’s educated guess, because today, while they’re the only two crew members on the ground, it would appear Jim Kirk is planning to spend a lot of the day thinking about having sex with one Leonard McCoy.

First, when they’re in the preliminary meeting and he finally separates and nails down the strains of thought, it’s just a hum on Jim’s part. Just a keyed-up, sexed-up undercurrent to the other shit—the actual important captain-y shit—rifling through his brain.

Then they go on the walking tour.

McCoy notices Jim looking almost wistfully down a long road that winds out into the countryside, and assumes Jim’s wishing for his motorbike. He walks up and claps him on the shoulder, prepared for the mental bombardment this time. He’s getting good at this, if he does say so himself. “Miss her?”

Jim shoots him a half-smile, but doesn’t really look away from the road. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

And McCoy can see that yes, the bike is what Kirk’s thinking of. The smell of leather and diesel teases his nostrils as his mind’s eye sees Jim running his hands over the seat, the handles, the shiny metal, then straddling her and revving her up, the expression on his face clearly showing it to be an act of love.

A very real, very plaintive, very honest love.

Suddenly McCoy’s mouth is somehow dry, and he finds himself unable to move, the hand on Jim’s shoulder proving to be a direct conduit for love and lust and a lot of other things he’d never thought a man would feel for a motorbike… Emotions wash through him, only to go back to Jim and lap upon themselves, churning and peaking with the throb of the engine until he’s chagrined to realize he’s out of breath.

And then, somehow, assumedly because it happens to be McCoy’s hand on him and not someone else’s, McCoy has joined Kirk on his mental motorcycle, straddling the warm leather cushion behind the captain. One hand burrows up under Jim’s shirt in search of warm skin while the other is fisted around the captain’s cock, and the look on his face is… is like it’s the only place he’d like to be.

McCoy feels it like an electrocution. He freezes for a split-second, then steps back as quickly as he can without arousing suspicion. He scuffs the ground with his toe, something he’s never done before in his damn life, but he’s so discomfited and they’re supposed to be acting like _diplomats_ , for Christ’s sake, not adolescents, and if Jim could just keep his mind out of his— _his!_ —pants for twelve blessed hours, then—

“Shall we move on?”

McCoy’s brain snaps to attention, and the picture vanishes. Thank _Christ_. He knows redness is creeping up his neck, but no one seems to notice anything out of the ordinary. Jim throws him a grin, and McCoy narrows his eyes at the captain. But there’s no way Jim can know what just happened, is there? No. There’s no way.

He smothers a grimace and follows the group to their next destination.

\---

Three hours later that grimace has turned into a full-blown scowl, accompanied by, if he’s being honest, a little bit of a tic above his left eyebrow. Jim has scampered off with some nubile colonist and left McCoy to deal with their hosts, _again_ , which isn’t exactly his _strong_ suit, thanks very much. He’s a doctor, not a diplomat. And even though he grits his teeth and does his best, it’s a pretty sad attempt. The colonists take pity on him at some point and drop the subject of intergalactic politics, so the conversation turns from complicated and aggravating to boring and aggravating.

Needless to say, when Jim shows up just in time to beam back aboard the ship, McCoy is in no mood to hear about his antics. But Jim shares them anyway. “She was a natural redhead, Bones, I mean, ev—“

“Shut up, Jim.”

“You don’t want to hear about it?” He’s got that fool grin on, and McCoy just doesn’t think he can _get_ more annoyed.

“Not unless you want to hear about my dinner with the Counselor General and his four wives, no, I don’t wanna hear a goddamn thing outta your mouth.” He’s stuck seeing it _in stereo_ in his _head_ , anyway. Not that Jim would know this.

Jim loses the smile briefly. “Anything I need to know about? You know, politically?”

“No.” He reaches for his communicator. “Scotty, please beam us the hell up.”

As they wait, McCoy tries to ignore what’s coming from the captain’s head, even though he knows it won’t work. Jim might’ve switched conversational tactics, but he’s still _thinking_ about the red-headed chit, and McCoy finds it exceedingly difficult to tune out the incredibly raunchy picture of Jim piled on top of some girl on one of those hillsides he remembers waxing poetically about mere hours ago.

After a couple more moments of mental struggle, he gives up trying to block it—he’s too damn tired and Jim’s thoughts are too damn obnoxious—and lets it come through loud and clear. And only then does he see that while Kirk enjoyed the moves he very thoroughly executed with the sweet young thing, he was not thinking of her while executing them.

No, it appears that while buried deep inside her, Kirk was imagining being buried deep inside McCoy. So says the picture that now fills McCoy’s head to the clanging, banging brim.

Jim has a hell of a thorough imagination, too. McCoy can smell the grass on the hillside, feel the small green blades bunching up between his fingers, and see the sweaty sheen they’re both sporting, the looks of absolute pleasure on their faces, hear the way he keeps growling Jim’s name while Jim just—Jim just _watches_ him, as if his main focus is McCoy’s enjoyment, not his own.

And if that’s not a sign it’s all a bullshit daydream, he doesn’t know what would be.

Oh, he has no doubt Jim’s a dynamite lay, what with having the energy of a bunny and the experience of a brothel’s worth of painted ladies, but come on. It’s Jim. To give more of a damn about your partner than yourself in bed means you have to give more than a damn about your partner, period.

And then he feels the familiar sickeningly sparkly feeling of the transporter, and he can’t think about it anymore.

\---

“Bones, I was wondering if you’d thought about—“ Jim doesn’t look up from his PADD until he’s halfway into McCoy’s quarters. “Oh. You about to go to bed?”

“What does it look like?” McCoy replies testily. He’s just finished his nightcap and has already slipped on his most beloved pjs, determined to actually get some sleep tonight. He’s thinking of having another drink, even, because he’s unwilling to admit there’s no way a hundred drinks’ll do nearly enough to bring true rest within his reach.

“It looks like you need new pajamas,” Jim replies. He’s close to chuckling, and it’s just the last thing on a long list of things that have tried McCoy’s patience today.

“As my daughter would so eloquently say, bite me.”

Now Jim actually does snicker, but as he watches Bones sit down tiredly onto the bed, he sobers. “Hey, listen. I should apologize for ditching you today, shouldn’t I?”

“What kind of question is that? Either apologize or don’t, jackass.”

The stream he’s getting from the kid’s brain is a half-assed apology, regret that McCoy had a rough time of it but indignant certainty that he had every right to do what he did anyway. Just another to add to a long list of reasons James T Kirk will always seem like a jackass, regardless of how many times he saves the world or how good he may or may not be in bed.

So when the captain opens his mouth, McCoy cuts him off. “Look, Jim, it’s been a long day,” —a long couple of nights, too, dammit— “and I’d just like to go to sleep, if that’s alright with you.”

Jim regards him for a second, then shrugs. “Sure.”

“Thank you,” he says dryly, his actual meaning—‘Go away.’—perfectly clear. He waits for the kid to leave, but Jim is hesitating. And suddenly the stream of images is changing from thoughts on the day to thoughts on the right now, featuring Kirk watching him get ready for bed, and McCoy does _not_ want to see where it will lead. “Goodnight, Jim.”

“Yeah.” After an unbearably long second, Jim slowly turns and strolls towards the door, taking his sweet time, and it’s not quick enough to stop the movie playing in his head—well, in _their_ heads, which is a thought he turns aside quickly—from becoming intimate, just as he feared.

But it’s a weird, fuzzy sort of intimate. It’s Kirk slowly divesting him of his admittedly tatty sleep shirt while raining soft kisses along his cheeks and throat, then gently pushing him down onto the bed so he can tease off the well-worn pants as well. It’s Kirk soothing every inch of skin he uncovers with slow touches of calloused hands. It’s Kirk coming up to kiss him gently, almost sweetly, in an utterly non-demanding, purely giving way, before kissing a path down the left side of his body and taking McCoy’s mostly soft cock into his mouth. It’s Kirk not thinking twice about it taking longer, because Bones is so damn tired, instead just being more patient and gentle than McCoy’s ever thought possible. It’s Kirk watching McCoy rise, climax, and fall with a look on Jim’s face that McCoy’s not ready to deal with in any way, shape or form. It’s Kirk hushing McCoy’s feeble attempts to reciprocate, instead shucking his own clothes and tucking the blankets around them both before brushing the mussed hair back from McCoy’s exhausted eyes and telling him to go to sleep.

It’s Jim Kirk apologizing.

“Goodnight, Bones.”

Jim’s voice, his actual voice, shakes McCoy loose from the fantasy, and he looks up, his eyes sticky with something, just in time to see the door slide shut.

He manages to reach the bathroom before retching up a sinkful of bourbon and stomach acid.

Tomorrow, he swears to himself as he crawls into bed, interested in nothing but sleep and forgetting. Tomorrow, everything will be fine.

That’s not enough for sleep, though, this time.

\---

 _Day Three_

He’s not tired. He really isn’t. The only reason he survived med school, new fatherhood, and the Academy is an ability to control his sleeping needs down to the minute.

But he sure as hell is jumpy. And grumpy. Maybe even grumpier than normal. If that’s possible.

“Quit looking at me like that,” he grouses lowly when he feels Kirk’s eyes on him for possibly the millionth time. It’s a slow day on the ship again, for sure. Starship travel, McCoy says in an imaginary speech to his daughter, is a lot like any other kind of travel: a whole lot of hurry up and wait. And sometimes being the boss means having _nothing_ to do.

“Then quit giving me cause to do so.”

McCoy snorts. “Cause? I see no cause.”

“Come on, Bones. Everybody here can tell—” He makes an expansive gesture and McCoy grimaces as the rest of the bridge crew’s faces embarrassedly support what Jim is saying. “—that you’re up to your eyeballs in jitters. To borrow a phrase from you.”

 _Jitters_ are not what he’s up to his eyeballs in. No, what he’s up to his eyeballs in are nausea-inspiring fantasies of James T Kirk, not to mention the random crap getting thrown his way by the rest of the crew. He can tune them out by now easily enough, admittedly, but Kirk’s thoughts are loud, obnoxious, colorful, and stick to him like goddamn glue.

Luckily for him, when Jim’s on the bridge, Jim’s mind is on the bridge with him. Oh, there’s the occasional foray into Uhura-land, but it’s mostly school-boy antics, like goosing her or peeking down her neckline.

And now McCoy has brought Jim’s attention back to him. Which was a pretty dumb move, he realizes with a grimace, but at least he doesn’t have to deal with two different realities. The movie in their heads is the same as the one they’re actually in. So to speak.

“See? There’s that face again.”

He rolls his eyes. “Give it a rest, Jim, or I’ll find some more vaccinations to give you.”

“As if you could. I think I’ve got every sort of virus known to the Federation kicking back in my veins, and probably a few that aren’t.”

Bones almost cracks a smile at that, and the picture he’s getting from Jim’s head brightens. Bemused, and accepting boredom as an excuse, he looks at it again, and he notices something new.

He notices that Jim’s wearing a wedding band.

Jim. Is wearing a wedding ring. In his own head.

James Kirk, courtier of a thousand women and not a small number of men, very big fan of the flavor of the week, month, and/or day.

Imagines himself married.

McCoy _cannot_ hold back a startled bark of laughter at the ludicrous idea, and Jim’s gaze turns sharp again. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Bones…” Jim’s got that ‘I’m your goddamn Captain’ tone creeping in, clearly for the purpose of needling McCoy.

So, fine, let him see what he gets by needling. “You want me to ask personal questions while we’re on the bridge, _Captain?_ ”

Jim looks around once, considers for a moment, then shrugs. “Just keep it clean, Doctor.”

“Easy enough. You ever think about getting married?”

McCoy swears Jim’s skin takes on a green tinge. He almost points out this fact to Spock, then decides that’s a little bit beyond the pale of even his own skewed sense of decency. Instead, he raises a mocking eyebrow at his captain. “I take that to be a no?”

Jim opens his mouth, then closes it. Then opens it again. When he finally manages to speak, his voice is normal but pitched surprisingly low, and McCoy pictures the rest of the bridge crew leaning in to try and hear what he has to say.

“Of course I have, Bones.”

Well, slap him three times and hand him to his mama, but that is _not_ the answer he is expecting. He’s suddenly more than a little uncomfortable about the fact that they’re having this conversation on the bridge, and takes an awkward step towards the captain’s chair. His voice comes out so low it’s nearly a growl. “To whom?”

Jim shakes his head and looks down, a corner of his mouth turned up in that sardonic way he has. “No one that’s asked yet, clearly.”

McCoy’s eyebrow climbs higher on his forehead at the sentence construction. “So it’s just a vague idea of maybe someday.”

Kirk flashes him an easy smile. “Maybe someday, yeah.” Then he spins the chair smoothly away from McCoy. “Mr. Chekov, how much further do we have to go until we reach our destination?”

“Approximately fifteen minutes, sir.”

“Splendid. What shall we do until then, hmm? More of this Twenty Questions that Dr McCoy so helpfully started us off on? Maybe some Tiddlywinks?”

And the crew exhales, straightens, and goes back to their duties. The moment is forgotten. By all but Leonard McCoy.

\---

That night when he can’t sleep, he finally ignores his training and listens to his instincts, going the one place he knows he can whip some of this excess energy out of himself.

The gym is bright and antiseptic, like always; it feels like the sickbay but there’s no sickness here, and so to McCoy it has become a second home. He pounds along the track for nearly an hour, letting the rhythm of his feet and his breathing become louder than the pounding in his head. It isn’t until far, far too late he realizes the sounds have become a mantra in his head, a litany of only two words: _Jim Kirk, Jim Kirk, Jim Kirk JimKirk JimKirkJimKirk—_

He stops short, doubling over with a case of the wheezes, and tries to stop his eyes from watering.

God _damn_ Jim Kirk.

“Kirk to McCoy.”

A groan rips from his throat at the truly ill-timed summons. “What the hell do you want, Jim?”

“Are you decent?”

“In a manner of speaking,” McCoy says wryly.

“Kirk out,” is all he gets before the communicator goes silent. He stares at it for a second, then shakes himself. He knows better than to just stop cold after a run like that, so he cajoles his legs into jogging leisurely around the track once or twice more while he waits for Kirk’s arrival. He tries not to think. It very nearly works.

“Bones!” Jim calls from the doorway before moving into the room. “Bones, stop running grooves into the floor. I’ve got more briefing notes for you on tomorrow’s intake of POWs.” He’s coming closer to the stairs that run up to the track, and despite the cool-down job, McCoy’s heart rate annoyingly refuses to back off. “See, turns out there are two pretty extreme religious sects among the group of prisoners, and they’re threatening to rumble if we don’t—“

He stops short when he finally crests the stairs not ten feet from McCoy, who’s standing on the edge of the track clad only in shorts and sneakers, chugging from a container of water.

McCoy eyes him. “What?”

“Um.” Jim swallows, and McCoy’s gut turns over as he realizes what’s about to happen. _No,_ he almost yells out loud. _Not right now, you lecherous asshole!_

Too late, though. The Jim in his mind has launched himself at the McCoy in his mind, and he can only hold on for the ride.

And what a ride it is.

Jim’s mouth is strong and wet and insistent and his fantasy McCoy is, of course, only too willing to volunteer a high level of participation. Their tongues slide against each other roughly, teeth flashing and getting in the way and causing coarse gasps of notquitepain, and Jim’s hands glide over as much of McCoy’s sweat-slicked skin as he can reach. Which, much to Jim’s delight, is quite a bit.

Hoarse whispers echo in his head as they both take in whatever air they can in between kisses, whispers like, “Jesus, Bones, you are so fucking hot,” and “Shut up, kid.” And, so quiet he can’t tell who says it, “Only for you.”

After that, they can’t even manage talking and it’s like time and reality have stopped, because they’re necking like desperate teenagers, hands fisting up in fabric and nails scratching at skin in an age-old but always futile attempt to fuse two bodies into one. The best they can manage is the simple magic of friction, of pants pushed hastily down and hips thrusting as close together as they can possibly get, rutting against each other messily, depravedly, too heated and too _needy_ to look for other options.

McCoy hears a grunt that he knows as his and watches, ignoring the onset of dizziness, as the two bodies rock against each other frantically. The air is thick with their groans and their _smell_ and it must just be the exhaustion but he is _feeling_ this one, down to his very marrow.

As they climb higher and higher, Jim sucks his tongue into his mouth again and again, breaking away only to breathe in McCoy’s nickname and breathe out a single, clearly precious word. McCoy has to strain to hear what it is, though, and the moment he finally does happens to be the moment he sees himself slide his left hand through Jim’s hair to grasp the back of his neck roughly—and sees the thick silver band around his third finger.

“Mine,” Jim is panting fiercely into his lips. “Mine.”

The air freezes in his lungs. With a crash, a bang, a peal of thunder he swears the whole ship should be able to hear, McCoy feels the implication like a punch to the gut.

Jim Kirk doesn’t just think about being married to someone in the indeterminate future. Jim Kirk thinks about being married to _him_. Right now.

A groan rips through his mind like a lightning bolt, and suddenly he’s thoroughly occupied by watching himself come. Sparks fly, he swears sparks fly, and he can’t inhale, can’t breathe at all because there’s a vicegrip of pleasure on his brain, on his cock— only none of it’s real, and he knows this, but it _feels_ so goddamn real, smells and tastes real, and he can _hear_ Jim’s rough voice staking a goddamn claim and then giving a long, shuddery exhalation of— “ _Bones_ …”

And he simply can’t tear his brain away from the image, even as the two men quiet into rasping breaths and sloppy kisses, holding onto each other with shaking hands as they come down from the precipice. McCoy’s hands shear through Kirk’s hair again and again, while Jim’s hands dip and glide through the sweat they’re now sharing, painting mindless pictures of love and lust on shiny biceps and pectorals and whatever else he can find.

Then he breaks the kiss and slides his hand lazily yet purposefully through the spilled mess of semen between them. Locking eyes with McCoy, he brings his fingers up to drag across his mouth once. Twice. Three times. Then he reaches over to McCoy’s slack, reddened lips, and does the same.

Marking them.

“ _Mine_ , Bones. Always.”

An exchange of fluids and pheromones, primitive motions making signs of base possession, left for the world to see. If they only could. His doppelganger lets out a harsh breath, and looks at Jim with more love than he swears he could ever really feel, more than he ever even had for—

McCoy’s throat closes up and there’s a burning somewhere behind his eyes. “Jim,” he hears his other self say before kissing the captain exquisitely thoroughly. “ _Jim_ …”

“What?”

Oh, _fuck_.

McCoy’s brain clears with a snap and he tries desperately to think of something useful, to think of _anything_ but the smell of Jim’s slick fingers... “I’m sorry, Jim, I was just—” He cuts off, because he can’t say the name again without being reminded of his other voice saying it in a tone dripping with lust, anticipation, and—

 _No_.

He clenches his jaw so hard a muscle jumps in his cheek. “Jim, can we possibly finish this in the morning?” He holds up a thankfully not shaking hand as Kirk tries to protest. “I heard what you said, and I’m sure it will be fine as long as we keep both their options and our eyes open when we’re going in. But you’ll brief us all in the morning, alright?”

He is not going to take no for an answer, and Jim must be able to tell. Eventually, he nods. “Well, alright. Probably should all be in bed, anyway.” He peers at McCoy for a second, and McCoy is proud to say he meets his gaze head-on.

“Right. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Bones.” On his way out the door, Jim tosses an easy grin back at him, and he feels his stomach clench. “And go take a shower, old man. You reek.”

\---

Once back in his quarters and cleaned up, McCoy doesn’t even look at his liquor supply. He just reaches straight for the hypo full of sedative.

Sleep takes him over almost immediately, his exhausted body welcoming it with open arms. His mind glides through blissful blankness for a full eight hours, and when he wakes up, gummy but solidly better, he swears to himself that everything’s going to be fine. Today.

\---

 _Day Four_

“Doctor?”

He hears a strange tone in the attending nurse’s call, and feels a crease develop between his eyebrows as he walks to where she’s standing. She’s pushed aside the privacy curtain to one of the med beds and is staring down at something, a blank expression on her face. She’s too far away for him to use the damn curse, and even as he gets within range and then closer, all he reads from her is abject consternation, so bright it whites out anything else.

“What is it?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

Then he finally looks at the object of her preoccupation. And he’s… he’s… He’s a doctor, not a security specialist, but even he can tell a bomb when he sees one.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says quietly. The thing on the bed is cold, silver, black, and unfathomable. “One of the prisoners must have slipped it past security, somehow,” he says absently.

Somehow. He can’t think of how. He can’t think at all. Don’t the ones in the movies always have a big red countdown clock, telling you that you have so many seconds to save the girl and get the hell out of the building? Why doesn’t this one have numbers? Why doesn’t this one tell him how long he has? _Why can’t he move?_

“Run.”

He hears his voice but he doesn’t feel himself saying it, doesn’t remember thinking he _should_ say it. The nurse takes his advice, though, even though he’s just standing there, staring at the— the box of death that’s so tiny it seems like it should be perfectly harmless. Just tip it right into the trash can and all will be well, right? He tamps down a humorless, slightly insane chuckle as it occurs to him how impotent he is in this situation. He’s not _good_ at this kind of thing. Anybody else would know what to do. Jim, Jim would _really_ know what to do, he’d probably come up with some fool plan to—

 _Jim_.

And it’s as if the thought of the captain is enough to break whatever spell he’s been under. He pivots and sprints across the room, shouting instructions and pushing buttons and god _dammit_ , he wishes he knew how much time they had before—

When he hears the bomb explode with a surprisingly tinkly thud, he thinks of Jim. Can almost smell Jim’s warm breath on his face. Then he feels a good hard knock to his skull the likes of which he’s never experienced, and slides into blackness.

\---

 _Day Six_

They’re in a hotel somewhere, he can tell, for this particular trip through Jim Kirk’s sexual deviances. They’re in a hotel on a planet with a sun or two. Maybe even Earth, McCoy muses, then realizes that he’s been to this hotel before. Like, in reality. It’s in San Francisco, right above a bar his friend owns, and he’s spent more than one night passed out in various empty rooms, unable or unwilling to go back to campus until absolutely necessary.

This time, though, there’s no hangover, he can tell. Late morning sunlight streams through the mostly open curtains, and dust mites are a-dancing in its beams. The bed is empty, but in such disarray that he has a feeling the sheets are still warm, and probably soiled beyond their usefulness.

He sees himself sprawled out on the couch in an undershirt and boxers, clearly just-washed hair going every which way while he flips through the screens of a medical journal. Or, hell, could be a trashy novel, for all McCoy knows. This is Jim’s head, not reality.

Speaking of… The bathroom door slides open and Jim walks through, one towel slung loosely around his waist while he dogs his hair with another. He sees Jim say something to his alter ego, but is startled when he can’t hear it.

He can’t hear it. The silence makes the vision strange, incomplete, and he itches for a knob to twist or a button to push so he can have the full picture. When none appear, as of course they won’t, he ignores the wistful feeling in his gut and concentrates fully on watching whatever’s unfolding in front of him.

He sees himself not look up from his reading while Jim talks. Sees Jim capture his chin between his thumb and forefinger and force him to look up, look into Jim’s eyes before he leans in for the kiss. It’s a lazy kiss, a tasty, lingering, I-just-fucked-the-shit-out-of-you-and-don’t-you-forget-it kiss, and a pain pings in a tiny spot in McCoy’s chest, somewhere alarmingly near his heart.

Then Jim shucks off the towels and tucks in beside him on the couch. McCoy watches himself adjust accordingly, slinging an arm around probably still damp shoulders and kissing the top of a towhead, before going back to the trade mag. McCoy curses mentally at the kick he feels in his gut when he sees the ring on his left hand. Then his eyes immediately search for— Ah, yes, there’s Jim’s, too, draped on McCoy’s thigh as he cuddles— _cuddles!_ —with his CMO.

Kirk won’t stand for such time-wasting, he’s sure. He’s sure the kid’s going to quit with the girly stuff and just drop down, tug on the elastic, and lick up and down his alter-ego’s cock.

But it doesn’t happen. Jim simply burrows into McCoy’s side, his apparently satiated penis happily limp against his thigh.

Jim Kirk, worn out? _Damn,_ he thinks. _I am truly magnificent._

 _…at least, in Jim Kirk’s head I am._

He’s pondering this when suddenly the scene is being sucked away from him. _No, dammit, I wasn’t ready to leave that one yet. I wanted—_

But his mind skitters away from that thought as quickly as it came upon it, and soon he’s left with only the smells of freshly-showered skin and stale sheets and a _splitting_ headache.

He can’t help but want to grumble about it, but when he tries, the groan he hears tear out of his throat is offensively pathetic-sounding, and he thinks better of it.

He struggles to open his eyes instead. The hand he didn’t realize was holding his tightens its grip for a nanosecond before quickly letting go. McCoy frowns.

Jim’s voice comes to him as if from a great distance. “No, don’t. The ship is fine. You can sleep as long as you want.”

Yeah, fat chance of McCoy letting _that_ happen. He squishes his eyelids together, then forces a few blinks, then, hallelujah, manages to peer up at Jim’s only somewhat blurry face. “The nurses… the patients…” he croaks sullenly.

“Everything’s fine, you stubborn jackass. Every _one_ is fine. Why don’t you ever believe me?”

His lips quirk up, which kind of hurts because they’re quite dry. “Because you’re rarely right?” His voice is so gruff it’s ugly.

“Pfft. I’m always right. There’s just never any proof, and you’re a _scientist_ , so you need bullshit like that.”

The mock hoity-toity in his voice coaxes a laugh out of McCoy. Which turns straight into a cough.

“Here.” There’s water in front of him instantly, and it’s a soothing balm if he’s ever felt one.

“I’m a doctor, not a scientist.” The fallacy of that makes him shake his head, but he only said it to make Jim laugh, anyway. He hears a low chuckle, and is satisfied.

Finally his eyes aren’t sticky and he can get a look at the captain. A good look around. He’s surprised at the small number of occupied beds around him. “It was more bark than bite,” Jim says, as if he can tell what McCoy is thinking. He’d be concerned about that if he wasn’t so focused on his job, but that’s how it goes sometimes. “You’re one of only five injuries reported.”

“And my bay?” He’s relieved to hear only a little more than the normal amount of gruff this time.

“Minor damages, all things considered. Supplies we have plenty of, that sort of thing. You’ll be able to operate pretty much exactly as before, and full repairs will be made in a week when we dock at Earth.” His face darkens slightly. “After we drop off these damn prisoners. They’ve been nothing but a pain in my ass.”

McCoy chuckles. “Now, Jim, you’re starting to sound like a grumpy country doctor. I don’t think that’s befitting of a captain.”

“I learned from the best.”

He suppresses a grouse, and his head throbs helpfully. “Can’t I have something for this damn headache?”

Jim stands up and reaches for a hypospray. “Now you can, yes. You were too…” He pauses to clear his throat, and McCoy looks at him, curious. He can smell the trails the fear and anxiety have left on Jim’s mind, and that ping hits McCoy square in the chest again. “You couldn’t before.”

“What…?”

“Intracranial something or other. Chapel can tell you about it later. Your hard-headedness is, apparently, only metaphorical.” There’s a half smile, then, which fades before he continues. “And we don’t exactly have a neurosurgeon on standby, so… We did our best.”

McCoy can see, vaguely, in flashes, what Jim has seen of the sickbay the last couple days. It’s a lot, and it isn’t pretty. “Clearly, as I’m cognizant.”

“You have a great team, here, Doctor.”

“I do indeed. Thank you.”

Jim’s still standing there, the hypo in his hand.

“May I…?” McCoy raises an eyebrow and feebly waves his hand.

“Oh, yeah, sorry. Hang on.” He clearly intends to call for the nurse, but McCoy won’t have it. He summons all his energy—which is so little it’s almost not adequate, much to his disgust—and swipes the injector out of Jim’s hand.

It takes a few seconds to kick in. Then he realizes it wasn’t just a painkiller. “Dammit, Jim,” is all he manages before his unwillingly unconscious head hits the pillow.

\---

 _Day Seven_

As in all wars, the doctor is left to deal with the ultimate irony—healing those who have killed. There are three prisoners in his sickbay today, and he’s got no choice but to fix them.

“Do not look so angry, doctor.”

McCoy almost spits in the guy’s face. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll just try to forget that you tried to blow me up, is that it?”

“It was not I who did that.”

“Well, maybe not, but your blessed religion supported it.”

“If that is what you believe, your Academy did you no favors.”

McCoy grimaces. “The Academy is just fine, damn it. I meant _your_ particular brand of your religion. You’re here, aren’t you? Being moved like cattle because you’ve committed some crime that goes against your planet’s _actual_ religion?”

The man is silent for a while, and McCoy chances a glance up from the knee he’s currently repairing. All he’s getting from this guy—all he’s gotten from _anyone_ , all _day_ —is vague smells, only at close proximity, and only of things that are obvious. It’s damn annoying. He wishes the damn curse would either be helpful or _go the hell away._

“That is not quite my story, no.”

“Oh, really.” It’s not a question. “And I suppose you’re actually the good guy, here? You’re merely here because you tried to save the women and children first?”

“You may use as much sarcasm as you wish, Doctor, but it does not change the truth.”

“What truth?”

“I am here because I loved.”

McCoy snorts. “Yeah, right.”

“You think I am not capable?”

McCoy takes a deep breath, counting to ten. “I didn’t say that.” _You jackass_ , he adds mentally.

“No, you didn’t.” The _But you implied it, you asshole_ is clear as a bell, damn curse or no.

There’s a pause, then the lack of mental stream from this guy, the lack of _answers_ , starts to drive him nuts. “So what happened to her? Did you two commit some romantic crime and get arrested together?”

Another pause. “No.”

“Oh? Where is she, then?”

“He is dead.”

A bolt of the man’s wrenching anguish hits him square between the eyes. McCoy’s hands still, poised above the man’s leg. “Oh.”

“He was always… more impulsive than I. More heart, more ego, more nerve. He tried to save someone that did not wish to be saved, and he perished because of it. I tried to save him, and so I am here.”

McCoy swallows. The details are flashing weakly in his frontal lobe—he can see the death, vaguely, blurrily, and he suddenly feels sick. He’s actually done with the man’s knee, anyway. He should just block the stream, get up, close the curtain and never look back.

He does the first one. But he hears the low words tumbling out of his mouth before he can do the rest. “Isn’t that—aren’t those sorts of relations—“ He’s damn proud of his tact, really. “—considered a sin on your planet?”

The man laughs. He downright _laughs_ , a pleasant-enough sound, but this time painfully rich with knowledge and pity, and McCoy knows, damn curse or no, that he’s laughing at _him_.

“I think you know how much that matters in the end, Doctor.”

\---

“Welcome back, Doctor McCoy,” Spock’s always-modulated tones greet him as the lift slides open and he steps out onto the bridge.

“Thank you, Commander,” he says through a clenched jaw, avoiding the eyes of any crew who chance looking in his direction. It’s always embarrassing to be sick when you’re a doctor, so he’s kind of been lying low, but Jim called him to the bridge, so to the bridge he has come. Grumpy as hell, but here.

“Bones! How’s the headache?”

“It was fine until a few seconds ago,” he drawls, glaring at Jim. “What did you want?”

“We’re about a half hour from the drop-off point. Are the formerly ill prisoners healed enough to be chucked into space?”

“Of course they are. You didn’t hire me for my good looks.”

Jim outright laughs at that. “No, clearly not. Alright, then, thanks.”

McCoy scowls at him. “For this, you called me up here?”

Jim shrugs. “Just wanted to make sure you remembered where the bridge was, Doctor. Never know what a good conk on the head might do you.” His tone is light, but McCoy is struck by a stream of the worry still lingering in the kid’s head. It fades quickly and McCoy finds himself reaching out with his brain, trying to hold on to the connection.

He needn’t worry, though, because the kid’s just changing topics. He sweeps his glance up and down Bones once, then shifts his gaze back to the view screen. “You seem to be in fine working order, though.”

A familiar musky smell fills McCoy’s nostrils, and he freezes. Jim is so totally imagining them fucking in the Captain’s chair, isn’t he? He _is_ , McCoy just _knows_ it, despite not being able to see it.

Hell, he practically _can_ see it, if Jim’s fantasy version of himself is anywhere near accurate. He can easily imagine him sprawled in the chair, fully clothed except for the undone front of his regulation trousers, watching McCoy suck his cock like it’s the sexiest goddamn thing he’s ever seen. And McCoy sees that the fantasy him thinks so, too, because he’s got his fist around his own heavily erect cock, looking up at Kirk like he’s enjoying the hell out of reducing the most infamous captain of Starfleet to a pile of panting, sweating—

McCoy just at that moment realizes that he’s watching _his own_ fantasy. Nobody else has instigated it, or plotted it, or decreed that fantasy-McCoy should be so aroused. He just is.

And he’s startled to find that actual-McCoy, as he stands on the bridge and stares at Jim, is pretty damn aroused, too.

He can’t hold back a surprised grunt. He feels a flush creep up his neck as he glances around to see if any of the bridge crew has noticed.

But apparently only the captain has heard him. He looks at McCoy appraisingly for a moment, then apparently decides it’s just residual head-injury shenanigans. “You’re free to go, Bones. Transport security will be down to pick up your prisoners in about twenty minutes. “

“Yes, sir.” McCoy nods once and walks away.

Once the door has hissed shut behind him, a rough jolt of laughter escapes him. Then another, and another and another until he thinks maybe he’s going mad up against the cool walls of the lift.

He wants to fuck Jim Kirk.

His brain is scrambling to catch up, to talk some sense into him, but it’s too late. And all his brain can really supply in the end, anyway, is that if he wants to fuck Jim Kirk, which he clearly does, then he must want to marry Jim Kirk, because, well, that’s just the way he’s wired, no two ways around it.

It should be a huge revelation, he thinks, bemused. With flashing lights and whistling bombs and several hula dancers or something, goodness knows. Instead, though, it’s been a Sunday morning of a revelation, slow and lazy and smelling of breakfast. Illuminating itself slowly so as not to startle him any more than necessary.

That reminds him of Jim’s particular Sunday morning fantasy, and his laughter fades until it’s just a smile pulling on his lips as he stares at nothing, lost in the remembered imagining. He doesn’t realize he’s softly rubbing the ghost of a ring into the third finger of his left hand.

\---

 _Day Eight_

“So, Bones,” Jim asks jovially as he sits down next to him in the mess. “Going home to see Jo?”

“’Course,” McCoy replies, nudging his food with a fork while he contemplates his next sentence. “I was thinking of staying in San Francisco for the first night, though,” he says casually.

“Oh, yeah? Why?”

He clears his throat, but the words still come out excessively gravelly. “There’s a place I haven’t been since we were in the Academy, and I wanted to visit once before going back to the farm.”

“What, Ghirardelli’s?” Jim teases.

“Very clever, kid.” He shoots a glare at the captain. “No, just this bed & breakfast down by the water, twenty minutes or so from campus…” He waves his hand dismissively. “There’s a pub below it, the owner and I go way back, etc.”

“Oh, yeah, I know that place. I’ve never been able to—“ Jim grunts. ”I’ve never stayed there.” McCoy once again marvels at the kid’s imagination, then, because his mental picture had been pretty damn near spot on. Then Jim flashes a grin at McCoy, and that train of thought swiftly derails. “Mind if I tag along?”

McCoy almost smiles as Jim plays right into his hands. He can’t hear or see or smell any damn thing anymore, from anybody, but he doesn’t need it. He’s got Jim Kirk’s number, and it’s only a matter of time. He feels like rubbing his hands together like an old movie villain.

But he refrains, of course. “Suit yourself,” he replies drolly instead. “I can’t promise to be very exciting company.”

“Well, Bones, I’ve managed to put up with you so far, haven’t I? Plus, we all know I can easily leave your grumpy ass and find my own company.”

“A reassuring notion, thank you.”

“Hey, I do what I can.” Jim is grinning at him full-out, now, and McCoy can’t stop the one corner of his mouth from turning up. Goddamn, but he loves the little shit.

\---

 _Day Nine_

The owner of the place, the colorful yet surprisingly hard-drinking friend of McCoy’s, is so obviously star-struck upon meeting the oh-so-heroic James T Kirk that McCoy has to smother a laugh. He’s tired, though, and overly ready to get Jim into the room and, although he tries not to dwell on it, the hell into bed—or couch, or sink, or whatever happens to be convenient—so he interrupts the semi-idolatry. “Is everything settled up?”

Jarod shifts his gaze to McCoy reluctantly, then scowls good-naturedly. “Yes. You’re all set. Now, I know you’re on vacation, but try and get _some_ sleep, okay?” He quirks an eyebrow at them, and McCoy can’t not chuckle.

“I’m sure we will. Thanks.” He shakes the proprietor’s hand again, then heads to the elevator. He shoots Kirk a raised eyebrow. “Quit gaping at me, Jim, people are going to think I just broke up with you.”

That gets a guffaw out of the captain. “Well, he _was_ a step away from propositioning me. Some people get upset about that sort of thing.”

“Some people, not me. You gonna take him up on it?”

Jim freezes for _just_ a split second, but McCoy sees it anyways, and it amuses him. “Well, I dunno, I’m kinda tired,” Jim throws back cockily. McCoy then volleys his usual eye roll, and Jim grins, and it feels like it always has. Mostly. Plus this annoying thrum of… of something. Energy. Awareness. Anticipation.

Then they’re at the correct door, and apparently Jim plans on following McCoy in before asking about his own room. Which works out fine for his line of thinking. McCoy runs the key card, and once the door slides open, he blocks the doorway until he’s put down his bags and can turn aside to let Jim through. He doesn’t want to miss the kid’s face once he sees the room.

He’s not disappointed.

Jim stops walking barely two feet into the room, just far enough for the door to slither shut behind him. His bags drop from his fingers, and the expression that steals over his features— Well, it looks like it’s Christmas, his birthday, and the last day of summer break, all at once.

His lips part softly, and he blinks hard once. “Bones… This is the strangest thing…”

“I know, kid,” McCoy says gruffly, unable to keep the smile from creeping into his voice.

But Jim isn’t paying close enough attention to hear it. “No, you really don’t,” he says with a short laugh. “I don’t know if this is supposed to be your room or mine, but if you say it’s yours, I might have to pull rank. Dude.” McCoy hasn’t heard this sort of childish delight from him in a long time. “I’ve never been here, but I’ve _pictured_ it. I’ve always wanted to stay in a room like this. Hell, I’ve always wanted to get—“

Then, _finally_ he notices the look on McCoy’s face. He stops short. “Bones?”

“You always wanted to get laid here, yes, I heard you. Well, here’s your chance.” He regards the room for a moment, quickly turning away from the gigantic four-poster that seems to be right in front of him. He listens to his blood thump through his brains a little more insistently than normal. Then he just _does_ it. Throws down the first card. “I thought perhaps we could share the room tonight.”

Jim stares at him. And stares at him some more.

Then, to his credit, rolls with the punch like a champion. Which, well, of propositions, he might just be. “Bones, you’re—“ He gestures in an abrupt circle, clearly unable to formulate the words he’s looking for.

McCoy lets him dangle for a while, then takes pity on him. “Straight?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not what I—“

“Ah. Old-fashioned?”

“Bingo.” Kirk rocks back on his heels, but doesn’t break eye contact.

McCoy nods, not looking away either. “That’s true.”

“Then forget it. You know what would come of—“ He jerks his hand between them again. “—this.”

“Yes, I do.”

“So quit acting like you’d be okay with it. That’s not Bones. And I like Bones just fine the way he is.”

“Fine. How bout you quit the charming philanderer act, then?”

He almost laughs at that. “Yeah, right. Then I wouldn’t be Jim Kirk. And you may be a cranky old bastard, but you haven’t been beside that Jim Kirk these past few years because it’s good for your health. So again, I’m saying: forget about it.”

“That, my young friend, is not going to happen.” Done with talking, he walks across the room and stops far too close to Jim. Jim doesn’t flinch, though, because he’s Jim. Just keeps that ‘I’m an unflappable bastard’ smirk hovering on his face.

Then McCoy puts a finger up to Kirk’s bottom lip and drags it slowly across once. Twice.

But before he can get to three, Jim’s got his wrist in a vicegrip and the smirk is nowhere to be found. “What are you doing?” he asks, his voice deadly quiet.

McCoy’s own voice is so gruff it’s almost inaudible. “Enjoying what’s mine.”

The grip on his wrist tightens. “Excuse me?”

McCoy shows his palm in a ‘don’t shoot’ gesture, which Jim heeds, letting it drop. The doctor settles for running his eyes lazily across those lips again. He’s trying to remember the smell. “You and me, kid, are a pair of possessive, sentimental old fools.”

Kirk’s tongue darts out to wet the corners of his lips as his eyes narrow at McCoy, and McCoy feels his torso lean towards those lips, drawn in without his permission.

Then revelation flashes in the captain’s ridiculously blue eyes, and Jim takes a sudden step back. “That Alfvén wave.”

McCoy has to try not to smile again. Not for nothing, but the kid _is_ a genius. He leans a hip against the bedpost and crosses his arms unhurriedly. “Yes.”

“It did something.”

“You could say that, yes.”

“I _knew_ you were acting strange—stranger, at least—but I didn’t—“ He stops short. “This room.”

McCoy nods slowly, carefully. “Yes.”

“You… saw.”

“Yes.”

“You can see inside my fucking mind?”

“Could. It’s gone now, faded once I got clocked on the head during the bombing.”

“Oh, you _could_ see inside my fucking mind, so that makes it okay. That’s a huge invasion of privacy, Bones!”

“Well, now, don’t get all self-righteous on me, Jim. It’s not like I could turn it _off_ , or I damned well would’ve. You think I wanted to see your addle-brained fantasies about Uhura’s cleavage, or, saints preserve us, Scotty’s truly deplorable ideas about hamsters?”

Some of Jim’s anger puffs out at the mention of the Lieutenant. “Hey, you’ve _got_ to admit she’s—Wait. Hamsters?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Except I kinda do.”

McCoy chuckles and shakes his head. Then he sobers, and doesn’t let himself think too long before throwing down another card. “It was damn awful at first. Everything was coming at me and I didn’t know who was who in my head and I thought maybe I was going around the bend. Then I figured out how to tune out everybody.” He rubs the back of his neck. “It took a shitload of effort, but I managed it—on everybody but you. For some damn reason, kid, you were inside my head like a goddamn tape worm.”

Jim grimaces. “Thanks for the image.”

“A horny tape worm.”

“Even better.” He looks at McCoy, the skin around his mouth tight, and they both know it’s not about the metaphor. “You should have told me, Bones.”

McCoy levels his gaze at him. “Back atcha, kiddo.”

Jim’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out for a minute. “Oh, Christ,” he finally manages to spit out, realizing the full extent of what this means. “You’ve seen _everything_ , then, haven’t you? The away mission— and the gym— and the— everything.” McCoy nods. Jim swallows. “Bones, I—“

McCoy shakes his head once, effectively cutting off whatever Jim was going to say. “So will you stay the night with me?”

Jim doesn’t move, and McCoy nearly twitches in the tense silence that descends. “It would change some things,” the captain finally says, his voice the littlest bit rougher than normal.

“Understatement of the year,” McCoy says wryly. Then he sobers, and for the first time, he feels a little sick with the idea that it could all go back to the way it was before. He’s studying Kirk’s face but coming up with nothing reassuring, or even damning. Just… hard bemusement. “You can say no, Jim. You can go on being the infamous Jim Kirk, and I’d understand. Being with me isn’t easy.” He grimaces, but the bitterness is no longer sharp. “I’m told it’s impossible, in fact.”

“Impossible isn’t in my vocabulary,” Kirk says almost absently. His tongue slicks across his lips again—a habit McCoy’s never taken much notice of before, but heavens above, he will now—and it’s clear he’s deep in the machinations of that obnoxious, brilliant mind of his.

“One of the reasons I love you,” McCoy murmurs without thinking.

Kirk’s sharp intake of breath isn’t missed by McCoy as his gaze snaps up to meet the doctor’s. McCoy himself can’t hardly believe he just said it. But he has, so, hell, might as well plunge merrily onward, right?

Right. Well. He uncrosses his arms, scratches at his temple. Finally, he looks up at Jim and just says it. “You’re ridiculous, and brash, and too pretty for your own good, and cocky, and cocksure, and pretty much a cockslut, pardon my language, and a genius, and a damn fine captain, and if you give head half as well as you think you do, then I would be a damn fool to pass you up.”

It hadn’t been so hard, once he’d gotten started, but Jim’s eyes are still totally unreadable. “I haven’t made an offer,” he finally says.

“Well…true.” The doctor has to concede the point.

“And you _are_ a damn fool.”

He raises his eyes to the heavens. “I’m fully aware of that, thank you.” He glances at Jim, then crosses his arms again, one hand absently at his mouth. The kid’s made a decision, that much he can tell, but other than that….

Suddenly he kind of wants the damn curse back, just for a minute. Just to know if he’s going to have to go downstairs and admit defeat to his buddy Jarod by asking for another room.

No, to hell with that, he decides grumpily. He’ll make Jim do the asking, _and_ the paying, the oversexed, backpedaling little shit—

—then he realizes that same little shit has just pressed him solidly back against the bedpost and pressed a determined kiss onto his lips.

Well.

That answers that.

McCoy smiles against Kirk’s mouth and breaks the kiss, a move of which Kirk clearly doesn’t approve because his hands scrabble along the doctor’s arms, shoulders, neck and he presses their bodies together insistently. McCoy can’t not ask, though. “Is this what you midwesterners call an offer?” His eyes are probably twinkling like a damn schoolboy’s, but he doesn’t care. “I just need to make sure, being as old-fashioned as—“

Jim grabs his face in his hands and kisses him so thoroughly that he forgets the question. His tongue does this thing where it swoops in and stakes a claim and then slides deliciously with McCoy’s, and it’s damn near dizzying. Kid has certainly earned his reputation, if this is any indication.

 _And now he’s mine._

That idea—well, and probably the arguably magnificent kissing skill being displayed—makes his body temperature soar and his skin start to tingle, and, thank God, his cock is very definitely becoming interested in the goings on. And his last worry—that things won’t work properly because, well, Kirk is a _man_ —falls away.

Somewhere in the cool doctor-y recesses of his mind, he’s curious to admit the ways in which it’s different, though. He likes how Jim’s body lines up with his, as they’re about the same height, yet wiry-Jim still seems... delicate, small, like something he should protect. Kirk’s clean-shaven at the moment, but there’s still something very masculine about the way he feels, his jaw and his chin and his cupid’s bow and the tip of his nose, and the hands on McCoy’s skin are definitely those of a man.

But the lips…

God _damn_ , those lips could make angels sin. McCoy’s making plans to set up a shrine to their unholy powers when he feels Jim try to pull away. He stifles a groan. “No, not yet. Just…” He pulls him back in and licks at those lips, especially the corners, in a teasing imitation, and he can feel Kirk’s smile.

“Jesus, Bones,” he says, sucking in a breath. “Yes, it’s a fucking offer. One that you’ve already said you’d accept. Now shut the hell up.”

“Aye aye,” McCoy says with a mockingly raised eyebrow, and finds himself pushed down on the bed for his sass.

Jim clambers on top of him and presses their bodies together again, stem to stern. McCoy groans when their cocks practically sizzle upon contact, even through their clothes, and threads his fingers through Jim’s hair without conscious thought, kissing him for all he’s worth. The captain’s mouth is hard on his, tongue strong and explorative and hot as hell, and he feels it all the way to his damn toes.

Then he feels Jim’s hand fumbling with his relic of a belt buckle (something McCoy wears with his civvies because it was a present from his mother, and not because it fits a stereotype, damn it), then impatiently pulling at his pants, and, when both tactics are unsuccessful, palming him hard through the fabric.

A shock of pleasure runs through him, yes, but something about it, something about the franticness of the movements, has McCoy putting his hand over Jim’s. “Easy, kid, we have all night.”

Kirk stills, then glances up at McCoy. His brows are drawn together just the littlest bit in that way nobody but McCoy ever notices, and his eyes are bright, piercing.

McCoy puts his thumb and forefinger on Jim’s chin and kisses him gently, dabbing his tongue along that beautiful bottom lip once because he can’t help himself. “We have longer than all night,” he murmurs. “We have a month of Sundays.”

Something sort of expels from Jim with the breath he lets out, and he’s no longer clinging to McCoy, he’s sinuously surrounding him, like a housecat or a creeper vine. McCoy shakes his head at the image, because Jim isn’t so static as a vine or disdainful as a cat. He’s lapping at McCoy like a puppy, really, getting his saliva everywhere and not giving a damn. Just happy to be there in the first place.

And McCoy is so totally, utterly all right with it.

“That’s a damn good thing,” Jim says as he slides his hands under McCoy’s shirt, slowly running his fingers over the smooth planes of abdominal muscles he finds there. He kisses the doctor once more, teasingly, sliding his tongue into his mouth then out again before McCoy has a chance to reciprocate. “Because I have enough ideas to last us that long. And then some.”

“Of course you do.” He tugs on Jim’s hair and forces a thorough kiss on him. He touches what he can reach, feeling the strong cords of shoulder muscles and the smooth line of neck and wanting to do more, to study every sinew and every bone and every fiber of this frustrating, amazing, fucking arousing man.

Then as Jim tugs his shirt off and begins exploring his chest with his tongue, setting off lightning bolts all along his skin, McCoy’s focus gets re-directed to taking in enough oxygen to support all his systems. Patience. Right. His hands settle for clutching at Kirk’s hair, fingers flexing, learning the contours of his scalp.

“Yeah.” Jim licks at a nipple and McCoy nearly jumps out of his skin. No one’s tried _that_ before, which is unfortunate because it feels damn amazing. Makes him wonder how long he’ll last under Jim’s ministrations, and that’s not a question he’s had to ask in a long time. “I’ve been wanting to do loads of inappropriate things, things unbecoming of a Captain, to your body for about, oh, forever.”

The corner of McCoy’s mouth twitches. “And if _you_ think they’re inappropriate, I can only imagine—Jesus—!” His sentence and train of thought end abruptly on a gasp as Jim’s mouth finds his bellybutton. He looks down to see a pink tongue darting in and out and around, and Jim’s wicked smile, and if he wasn’t hard before, he damn well is now. From his own goddamn bellybutton. Will wonders never cease.

“At first it was because you threw up on me,” the captain continues against the doctor’s skin, punctuating his speech with lazy swoops of his tongue right below McCoy’s external oblique muscles. “I figured anybody with enough chutzpah—not to mention crazy—to join Starfleet while being afraid of flying would be a wild ride in the sack.”

“Mostly a lot of crazy. And, as I’m sure you noticed—“ He has to stop to stifle a groan, and almost succeeds. “—a lot of liquid courage.”

The tongue makes its way down from his bellybutton, following the happy trail to the belt buckle. McCoy grits his teeth and tries not to tighten his fist in Jim’s hair. “Then it was because you were smart as hell. Best doctor in the Academy, balls out. And smart and talented? Sex on a stick. Add in a little of the ‘ex-wife broke me so I drink like a beast’ and God, I made good use of the fact that ‘bones’ is something you can say during sex and only look mildly crazy, not like a total douchebag.”

Over the buzz this revelation causes in his mind, McCoy hears a clink and realizes that his belt buckle has just hit the floor. Before he can make a word of protest—or, hell, approval—Jim is up and kissing him again, and McCoy kisses him back, not even caring if he seems overly enthusiastic, because he has to give credit where credit is due and god _damn_ but this kid is good.

Jim breaks the kiss to suck a path down McCoy’s jaw. McCoy fights the urge to tilt his head up, and then decides to hell with it and lets it happen. He hears an encouraging noise come out of his throat, and lets that happen too. “And then the _Enterprise_.” The captain’s hands make leisurely work of the doctor’s belt and zipper before stroking their way underneath the fabric. Encouraging noises turn to outright grunts. “Shit went down, and although I was miffed at you for a little while for the whole ‘letting Spock kick my ass – twice’ thing, I got over it. You’d gotten me on the boat, after all, at _huge_ risk to yourself. And Spock eventually told me what you’d said to him about it.”

McCoy feels himself flushing, and it’s not just from the fingers carefully mapping out his hipbones. “Did he preface it with, ‘And then the doctor used a mildly inappropriate metaphor’?” he gruffs.

Kirk laughs, then moves up to kiss McCoy again, like he just can’t help himself. “How did you guess?” They both let out rough sounds as their bodies align with Jim settled slightly in the cradle of McCoy’s hips. Kirk has a wicked grin on his face. “But it just made me want to do even _more_ unbecoming things to your body.”

“Well, thank God for that,” McCoy grumbles. He’d never thought talk all that arousing, but he’s hard as sin, his patience is about run through, and Jim has far too many clothes on. If he hears the kid say ‘unbecoming’ one more time, he cannot be held responsible for his actions.

He casually rucks a knee up and around Jim’s hip and flips them over without so much as a how d’you do, so they’re on the other side of the bed and he’s settled on top of a startled Jim, his thighs straddling the captain’s lightly.

Jim stares at him for a moment, his pupils dilated and his breath coming quickly through a mouth gone a little slack. Then his tongue reaches out to touch his upper lip, and McCoy is goddamn done for. He growls, actually _growls_ , and kisses Jim so hard it almost hurts. Neither of them care. It’s clacking, sloppy kisses that tear through them both, leave them gasping apart, then have them coming back for more.

His breath bounces back at him hotly as he circles the shell of Jim’s ear with his tongue, and when he bites down on the cord in his neck, Jim lets out a groan and it’s the sexiest damn thing McCoy’s ever heard. “Clothes, now,” he rasps into Jim’s shoulder, and the captain grunts his agreement.

Their hands alternately fight with each other and work as a team, first stripping Jim of his shirt then making quick work of everyone’s pants and shoes and socks and underthings. McCoy has never before considered men’s apparel to be such an annoyance, especially when compared to women’s, but right now he hates every bit of it with a passion.

Finally, it’s all off and there’s an excess of riches in front of him and he doesn’t know where to start. Jim makes the decision for him, yanking him down by the back of the neck to kiss him while his other hand goes straight to McCoy’s cock. The doctor gasps into his mouth. “God, Jim,” he rasps, barely aware of what he’s saying because Jim’s hand is working his cock with such aplomb that his brain starts to spin.

Kirk grins. “I’m not even going to comment on the redundancy of that statement.”

McCoy groans and kisses him to shut him up, or at least tries to before Jim’s hand becomes truly insistent, stroking him up and down at an irrefutable speed. Then his mouth sort of falls away to settle at Jim’s neck, occupied with the concept of breathing out and then in again, absently mouthing wet kisses along the heated skin.

“I know we’ve got all night,” the captain says quietly, his voice liquid smoke in McCoy’s ear, “but I’ve been waiting way too fucking long to see this.”

McCoy can’t protest, doesn’t want to, as heat spreads over all of his extremities and he feels his balls tighten in anticipation. He clutches at Jim instead, making pathetic noises and pushing himself willingly into that tight fist.

As the lights explode behind his eyelids, he hears Jim’s breath hitch.

“Jesus, Bones.” McCoy chuckles, or at least thinks of chuckling. He’s not sure if he manages, and he really doesn’t give a damn. He has just enough energy left to flip over before sinking backwards into the mattress, feeling his spine relax and his head fall back into the overly sumptuous hotel pillows. Jim’s at his side, kissing him, gently, and he reaches up with one hand to cup the captain’s cheek while kissing him back as best he can.

After a few minutes, his head clears a little bit. He realizes that he’s sprawled out on the bed in a very undignified way, his thighs relaxed with Jim lying in between them. Jim’s cock is still quite hard… which he can tell because it’s nudging against McCoy’s perineum.

McCoy’s whole body tenses up at that realization; he can’t help it. But Jim knows. “Relax. I’m not that much of a douche.” He kisses the corner of McCoy’s mouth. “I just want to— Here, let me show you.”

He gently pushes McCoy’s thighs together, then straddles them. His hand glides through the semen on McCoy’s stomach, deliberately coating his fingers; McCoy’s eyebrow twitches at the sight, and he’s not sure if it’s because it seems disgusting or because it seems arousing. Both, probably.

But as Jim uses the liquid to slick up first his beautifully aroused cock (because hey, McCoy’s a doctor, he firmly appreciates the human body, and this is a damn fine specimen), then McCoy’s innermost thighs, ‘disgusting’ flies right the hell out the window. He’s pretty sure he’s caught on to Jim’s clever—albeit slightly depraved—idea, and at the very least, he’s downright curious to see if it will work.

Jim seems confident enough, of course, as he leans forward to kiss McCoy. “Always wanted to do this,” he says blithely as he presses McCoy’s thighs together more firmly and pushes his cock into the crease at their apex.

So far, so good. It’s a slick slide in and out, and the look on Jim’s face is quite rewarding in and of itself. “Why don’t I have trouble believing that?” McCoy says, enjoying how Jim’s cock rubs just right along his perineum and the underside of his balls. “Although it wasn’t in any of the, uh, imaginings I got to witness.”

Jim laughs, albeit a little breathlessly, and kisses him again. “I just hadn’t come to it in my rotation yet.” His eyes drift shut as he slides his cock in and out of the makeshift hole, slowly, clearly enjoying himself. “ _Christ_ that feels nice.”

McCoy can’t help the smile that settles on his face. He brings his hands up to touch Jim’s cheek, then kisses him, this time forcing his hand and taking charge of the kiss. His tongue explores Jim’s mouth methodically, sharing air as Jim starts climbing to the peak. He tastes like… well, like he always figured he himself tastes. A little like garlic, a little like toothpaste, and a little like every day life. The warmth that spreads through McCoy’s chest is almost overwhelming.

“It started for me when you came in with those scratches,” he says roughly, softly. His hands slide down Jim’s neck and back as he talks, touching as many of the working muscles as they can reach before moving around to the front and doing their level best to find places on his chest that make Jim grunt or speed up or twitch in that good way. “I told you to think about sex, and then I could tell that you were thinking about sex with a man, and I—“ He stops. In the name of research, he gives a light pinch to Jim’s right nipple, and is rewarded with a shudder and a curse.

“You what?” Jim murmurs.

McCoy kisses his top lip once. “I was jealous as hell.”

Jim groans and reaches for another kiss, sloppy now as he approaches climax. “More,” he gasps. “Please, Bones.”

McCoy shifts his weight the littlest bit so the angle is different, starts to move his hips in time with Jim’s thrusts, and the captain groans again. “Yes, fuck, you’re— _fuck_.” He’s clutching at McCoy like the doctor’s his anchor, and his skin is flushed as his breathing grows more labored.

“I watched all your fantasies of people other than me,” McCoy says, his voice barely more than a rumble, “and couldn’t think about anything but how much it should’ve been me.” He kisses Jim’s neck. “Should’ve been me going down on you in your ready-room.” Switches sides, kisses more neck. Jim whimpers. “Me you were fucking on that away mission.”

“You,” Jim grunts. “Yes, Bones— Ah—“

And Bones feels Kirk’s orgasm nearly like it’s his own. They’re so close to each other, skin against skin, that their sweat and semen are inseparable. As someone who trades in bodily fluids for a living, that detail makes it all so very, very real.

He ponders this while Jim comes down, stroking that almost-blonde hair as it lies next to his cheek. He thinks again that he should feel as though he’s cleared a hurdle, climbed a mountain, overcome an adversity. Done something extraordinary.

Really, he just feels like he’s finally come home at the end of a long, hard day.

\---

They fell asleep for a while, McCoy discovers when he scratches his tummy and feels the lovely crust of old semen. Sex knocks men out, it’s true, so he’s not surprised; he’s just surprised he didn’t insist they clean up first. But this is par for the new course, he has to admit. Things are going to be different with Jim, and that’s just how it goes. Stubbornly adhering to old mores didn’t work the first time, and this time— Well, this time, he has more to lose and is far less willing to lose it.

However, he really, really needs to piss at the moment, so he has to break the tranquil scene anyway.

Jim makes this disgustingly adorable snuffling sound when McCoy moves away from his side, and he pauses to drop a kiss on the kid’s forehead.

He realizes what he’s done after he’s done it, and can’t quite believe he’s fallen back into this pattern without even really ascertaining if it’s what Jim wants. He finds himself stuck there on the edge of bed, staring at Jim, his head kind of buzzing at him. His gut and his brain are at high noon, and he wants to put a hand over his face so he doesn’t have to watch—

Then the blue eyes blink open and an arm reaches out for him, hovering vaguely above the bed sheet while making grabby-hand motions. “Bones?”

“Go back to sleep, kid,” McCoy says quietly. Then he leans forward and kisses him. Sleepy breath and all. The showdown, it seems, was over even before it began. “I’ll be right back—” But Jim’s eyes are already closed again, the echo of a satisfied smile on his face.

When McCoy slips back into bed, he’s brought a damp washcloth with him. He runs it over Jim’s soiled skin in practiced motions, watching the physical evidence disappear to leave only the invisible mark McCoy knows is now stamped on both their bodies.

He can tell the second Jim’s eyes open, but doesn’t look up. Instead, he takes the opportunity to thoroughly examine this most precious of torsos. Precious to Starfleet, to Winona Kirk, to a crew full of people who otherwise wouldn’t be alive several times over, and now, as always but for the first time, to one grumpy country doctor.

“That kinda tickles,” Jim murmurs.

“Liar.” McCoy can see Jim’s cock thickening and reddening. “And I see some pretty damning evidence.”

“Yeah, well. Wanna make something of it?”

McCoy meets his eyes with a snort, ready to say hell no, but then he sees that Jim actually expects absolutely nothing from him. And the door in his head springs open and he can’t even fathom backing down from the challenge. He thinks he might even enjoy it.

Jim must be able to see the change in his face, because suddenly his eyes get impossibly brighter, and bluer, and his damn tongue darts out _again_ to wet his damn lips.

McCoy swallows, looks from that mouth to that cock, and licks his own lips.

“You don’t have to,” Jim says quietly, giving him an out. “I know it’s—“ And then it sounds something like ‘unghgn’ but McCoy can’t really tell over the roaring in his own head. _I can’t believe I’m doing this_ and _I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to do this_ are doing a cha-cha in his cerebral cortex and it’s kicking up quite a racket.

Jim tastes like salt, and tang, and that indescribable skin taste, and it’s not unpleasant at all. He does indeed like the feeling of power that comes with feeling a cock swell against his tongue. He doesn’t even really have to move yet; Jim’s breathing is shaky from just the heat and wetness of McCoy’s mouth.

After a minute of that fun torture, though, he gets curious and moves. Just his tongue, up around the sides. Researching. Jim makes an encouraging noise, and that settles that. More noises like that need to happen.

McCoy is either naturally good at it, or medical training comes in handy in very unexpected ways, or Jim is just easy, because he manages to make them happen a lot, with his tongue and his lips and the back of his throat and his hand on and under Jim’s balls. He can tell Jim is having to refrain from thrusting into his mouth, and is impressed to find that the whole thing _is_ pretty damn arousing. He absently palms his own growing erection, and looks up when Jim mutters his nickname. “Fuck that. Come here.”

Then his hands are on McCoy’s upper arms, dragging him up to his lips for a desperate kiss. Their tongues are learning their way around each other slowly, the dance getting more intricate and more effective, and McCoy feels his cock begin to throb in earnest.

He can’t help breaking the kiss with a groan when he feels the kid’s hand wrap around both their cocks at once. “Ah— Jim—“ He looks down, his forehead against the captain’s, watching the fascinating movement of Jim’s hand on both of them, watching the skin fold and unfold and the slickness of both saliva and seminal fluid appear then disappear then appear again.

Then it feels too damn good and he can’t watch anymore. He settles for holding Jim as best he can, murmuring nonsense until they’re both panting and he has to hand it to Jim, because it can’t just be luck that they’re both coming at the same time, and coming hard.

“Goddamn, kid,” he says once he has his breath at least a little back.

Jim shoots him a shit-eating grin, of course, although McCoy can see the truth in his dilated pupils and flushed skin. “Couldn’t’ve said it better myself.” He kisses the doctor, and it’s so gentle it makes McCoy’s gut turn over. “I knew it would be like this. And I was right.”

“Yeah, yeah.” McCoy steals another kiss, because he can. “Doesn’t help with the mess, though.”

Jim’s nose wrinkles a little. “True. But I think we still have that—“ He rustles around in the bed sheets for a moment, then pulls out the crumpled washcloth triumphantly. “Yup. Tada!”

McCoy just shakes his head, his lips twitching. “That’s disgusting.” He snatches it out of Jim’s hand and goes to get a new one.

When he comes back, Jim promptly takes it from him. “My turn.” McCoy hesitates, then shrugs and lies back on the pillows.

Jim swipes the fabric over himself efficiently, just enough to get the job done, then settles on his side nudged right up against McCoy, half propped up on McCoy’s body and half propped up on his other hand, and starts in on what turns out to be the most thorough wash-up job McCoy’s ever undergone. It’s not arousing, and it’s not meant to be. But by the time it’s done, and Jim’s lapsed into smoothing circles into McCoy’s skin, McCoy’s chest hurts. In a powerful good way.

His hand finds the back of Jim’s neck, fingers running through the fine hairs there. Jim makes a hum of appreciation and relaxes fully into McCoy’s side. McCoy knows it’s time. “So.”

“So.” Jim’s voice is light, but McCoy can tell he knows it’s time, too.

“You have no real plans for your leave. Don’t try and argue with me, I can tell. You’ve discovered the natural McCoy aptitude for… intimate relations. You’ve said before that you wanted to see the farm. Joanna has been positively dying to meet you ever since you made the ‘Top 10 Hotties of Starfleet’ list in that awful teenybopper rag all her friends are reading these days.” He pauses. Clears his throat. “My cousin’s a justice of the peace in the town next door.”

Jim snerks. “You southerners and your cousins.”

McCoy rolls his eyes and cuffs Jim lightly on the back of the head. “Damn stereotypes never die, do they?”

“Maybe I should start calling you ‘Bubba.’” Jim looks up at him with a dastardly twinkle in his eye.

McCoy shifts so that Jim’s mostly on top of him, held fast by the doctor’s firm grip. “If you even so much as _think_ that ever again, so help me God, you will never see the end of the hyposprays I will find to use on you. And if you think I’m putting them in a convenient place like your neck, think again.” He reaches down and pinches the soft skin where Jim’s thigh meets his ass, to punctuate his point, and Jim lets out a rather undignified yelp.

“Hey! That’s a fine specimen of human buttock you are desecrating!”

McCoy’s lips twitch. “Yes, well…” He pinches the other one. Jim flings out a hand, finds one of the pillows they’re not currently occupying, and pelts McCoy square in the face with it.

McCoy grabs his wrist before he can repeat the action, and narrows his eyes at him. “Oh, it’s _on_.” And he practically tosses the captain across the bed before grabbing a pillow of his own.

McCoy is bigger across the shoulders but Jim is a wiry one, and knows how to use his magnificent body to his advantage, distracting the hell out of McCoy again and again until the doctor finally decides to go down and dirty, pinning the captain down in order to tickle him into compliance.

“Oh my god I give up! I give up!” Jim can barely breathe through his laughter. McCoy stops tickling but keeps him pinned, to make sure he’s not crying wolf. Eventually, he’s not, and they flop into a pile of arms and legs and torsos, two hands laced together on McCoy’s stomach.

“That was so fucking girly, dude.”

McCoy snorts. “Yeah, well, I have a pre-teen daughter. What do you want from me? Besides, you’re kinda pretty.” He leers at Jim, who laughs a real laugh, throwing his head back against the pillows and showing a lot of teeth. McCoy’s chest pingpingpings and he tightens his grip on the captain’s hand. There’s a lazy, hazy silence for a moment, then—

“I want to, Bones. Don’t think otherwise. But it might be a stupid decision, regardless.” Jim’s voice is suddenly too quiet, and _way_ too mature, and McCoy knows he’s not talking about sex, or the ship, or whether they should actually go downstairs for breakfast in the morning.

“Yeah. So?”

“I mean, okay, so I imagine that we could work well together in that capacity. I know we work well in other capacities, now including this one. I want you with me, and I know that for you that means certain things, none of which are beyond what I find—a little to my surprise—I’m willing to do. But sometimes shit happens, and you can’t stop it.”

McCoy doesn’t need the damn curse to be able to see the words _USS KELVIN_ flashing across Kirk’s mind, or the quiet fear lurking just behind. “Will you shut up?” he says gruffly. “I’ve been married once, I know the risks involved. And I’ve been your friend and officer for long enough to know the risks there, too. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let your suddenly cautious ass talk me out of doing this properly, seeing as you just spent a week talking me into it.”

“Hey! There was no talking involved!” Jim pauses, suddenly bemused. “That’s a mad skill, actually. I blew your mind and didn’t even know I was doing it. I am truly amazing.”

McCoy groans and has Jim underneath him in two seconds flat. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”

“Yes,” Kirk manages between kisses, slightly ridiculous toothy kisses because now neither of them can stop grinning like the fools they are, “but I always assume no means yes with you.”

“Oh, now, isn’t that nice.” He bites a path down Kirk’s neck to the place where Jim’s neck meets his shoulder, making the cord stand out in an invitation. He accepts gladly, ignoring how Jim’s arms push against him as the captain attempts to get control of the situation. McCoy’s mouth twitches against salty skin. “Is that the line that gets all the ladies?”

“I’ll have you know that I am perfectly willing to accept when a woman says no.” Jim then manages, through some miracle, to heave McCoy a little bit off of him and lever himself halfway up.

Bones just shoves him back down again, though, settling himself in the cradle of the captain’s hips so he can use his bodyweight to pin him there. “Yeah, maybe. The sixth or seventh time.”

Jim tries to use his thighs for maneuvering. It almost works, but mostly provides a lot of really super friction they pretend to not enjoy. McCoy is nearly hard again—which would have him preening if he was that sort of man—and he can tell Jim’s there, too. “Well, in polite society, women are taught that they should always say no, so I find that it takes some—“

They both freeze as McCoy’s cock bumps firmly against Jim’s entrance.

“…gentle persuasion,” Jim finishes softly. Surprise passes over his face for about point-two seconds, then he just regards McCoy with an eyebrow cocked, looking as if he’s trying to figure what’s going on in the doctor’s mind.

Trouble is, the doctor doesn’t even know.

That makes the decision easier for Jim, apparently. “Do it.”

McCoy’s eyebrows snap together. “I—“ He closes his mouth, tries to think. “You can’t be serious.”

Jim’s strong thighs wrap around McCoy’s hips in an outright sinful manner, and McCoy stiffens with a groan. “I can’t?” He puts his hand on the back of McCoy’s neck and pulls him down for a kiss, his tongue seeking out the doctor’s and the accompanying shudder running through both of them. “I trust you.” Then he grins that wicked grin. “And I know you were a Boy Scout.”

McCoy blinks for a minute, then tilts his head back as a full-throated laugh overtakes him. “Why, you little—“ He kisses Jim hard. “Smartass.” He shifts up to his knees and scratches his chin. “Alright. I feel like I should make you sign a waiver, but—“

“Just shut the hell up and go get the stuff.”

“Fine, you—you—whippersnapper.” He can’t believe it, but he thinks he actually _grins_ as he slides off the bed to retrieve the necessary accoutrement from his luggage. Damn kid is right, though; he _had_ thought of it. At the last minute. And called himself stupid for packing it. But—it never hurt to be prepared, damn it. You just never knew.

“I’ll try not to say ‘turn your head and cough’ at any point,” he drawls as he shifts back onto the bed and settles in between Jim’s thighs. The captain’s completely laid out, his mouth a little red and his cheeks a little flushed, and McCoy has to admit that it’s a damn beautiful sight.

“You’d better not, you bastard. I am still your superior offi— _Oh._ “

McCoy feels not a little triumphant as he pulls his slick finger a little ways out before working it back in gently. “What was that?” It’s an interesting sensation, to be pressing past first the outer ring of voluntary muscle, which Jim has managed to relax quite well, then the inner ring, which follows its cue and relaxes as well, much to McCoy’s relief. He’s in no way interested in leaving _that_ sort of mark today.

“Fuck if I can remember.” Jim’s voice is languid as his head falls back on the pillows. Clearly, he’s going to enjoy this. McCoy unhurriedly adds another finger, which elicits a grunt from the kid. “’s good.”

“Yeah, it is,” McCoy murmurs. Jim’s gorgeous, nobody’s going to argue against that, but to see him like this is just mind-blowing. McCoy’s never going to come back down, swear to God.

He leans in to kiss him, and Jim starts to move against his hand, just little experimental pushes. Of course, too, he keeps talking. Kid can run his mouth any fool time, apparently. “Man,” he murmurs into McCoy’s lips, “I am one lucky son of a bitch.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me how, even if I don’t want to hear about it,” McCoy says wryly, his roughened voice belying his true opinion on the matter.

“Of course.” He flashes a smile, touches McCoy’s mouth with one hand briefly. “After a million years wandering around, enjoying the hell out of the imperfections of human nature and knowing no one will ever fit well with me, I end up waking up every morning with a—” He interrupts himself with a hum of approval as McCoy tries a bit of a new angle. “With a hard-on for a doctor.”

He searches out McCoy’s mouth for a light, wet kiss. “And not just any doctor. A grumpy old country doctor with an ex-wife and a _kid_ , for Christ’s sake. I don’t even carry that much baggage with me when I go on shore leave. Yukyuk.”

“You’re cracking jokes right now? Really? Do you realize where my fingers are?”

Jim tilts his pelvis with a raised eyebrow. “Yes. Because it turns out my dick steered me well, despite the astronomical improbability. To someone who can stitch me up when something evil befalls me, as it is want to do, and to someone with—“ His breath hitches as the doctor crooks his fingers a certain direction; triumph warms McCoy’s chest. “Dear _God_ , Bones, you have the most magnificent hands that have ever walked this earth.” He chuckles hoarsely “…despite the awkwardness of that imagery.”

The other corner of his mouth turning up, McCoy adds another finger to prove Jim’s point. Jim gasps, then tucks his head against McCoy’s shoulder. “And somehow,” he feels the captain mumble into his skin, “you are the someone that fits.”

McCoy knows, he _knows_ that his heart hasn’t actually stopped. “Goddamit, Jim.”

He stills, trying to regain his composure. Then he removes his fingers and uses them elsewhere. The thighs around him flex in anticipation, and he looks up. Those blue eyes lock onto his, and all he sees is—Well—

“Please, Bones.”

He’s still for a moment longer, then moves and moves until he’s _just_ inside Jim and oh sweet _heavens_ he almost can’t handle even that much. He grits his teeth, plants his hands on either side of Jim’s face, and leans down till he can feel Jim’s breath on his skin. He’s going to get this out if it kills him. “I love you too, you bastard.”

Jim’s legs tighten impossibly around McCoy’s torso, and his arms slide around his neck to kiss the hell out of him. “I know,” he murmurs into McCoy’s lips. “Now for the love of God, fuck me.”

McCoy growls. “With pleasure.” He thrusts forward into the tightness, trying to start slowly but failing spectacularly. It’s just like in Jim’s fantasy, with the sweat and the smells and the look of absolute pleasure on Jim’s face—Except ten hundred thousand times better. For his soul, yes, but goddamn, for his cock it’s just _magnificent_. He’s going to embarrass himself here in a couple seconds.

The thought makes him grimace. He slows, kisses at Jim’s jaw, tries to steady his breathing. Jim’s cock waves at him, providing a welcome distraction, and he squints down at it. Jim’s fist is on it, and McCoy can’t stand how hot that is.

To hell with it. He puts his hand with Jim’s and increases the friction. Jim groans appreciatively, thrusting into their combined grips, and Bones can’t stop himself from thrusting into Jim harder in turn.

As if he can tell, which, hell, he probably can, Jim’s voice slides into his ear. “It’s okay, Bones. I’m with you.” And as McCoy comes, way too quickly, he hears Jim’s accompanying grunt, and he thinks, alright, now he can die a happy man.

But for the first time in a long time, he really, really doesn’t want to, just yet.

\---

“Not gonna lie, I might get off on thinking of you touching patients with these hands.” He smirks. “Do a lot of prostate exams, Doctor?”

“You know the answer to that, Captain,” McCoy answers with an eyebrow quirked. They’re finally _under_ the blankets, cleaned up and tucked up, half curled up in each other and half sprawled on top of each other. It should be uncomfortable. It’s not.

For some reason, Jim is examining McCoy’s hands, utterly fascinated. The doctor is a little mystified. “It’s not like you’ve never seen them before, Jim.”

“I know, I know. But they—they’re magnificent, no joke. These fingers—“ He rubs one of them, gently, then two of them, and McCoy has to fight the urge to curl up against him and purr. “They save lives. They _deliver_ lives. They take lives, if they have to.” His grip tightens momentarily. “They’ve saved my ass any number of times, you know? And yet, they’ve been _inside_ of me. You gotta admit, that’s kind of cool.”

McCoy shakes his head into the pillow, suppressing a smile even though Jim’s not watching. “Well, it’s not brain surgery, but there are worse endeavors they could be undertaking.” He knows Jim smiles at that, he can just tell.

He can feel when the kid sobers, too. His hand keeps rubbing McCoy’s, working its way to his palm, but it’s different somehow. “What?” he says gruffly.

“That might happen, you know. There are some things I can’t change.”

McCoy freezes. “Jim… What… ? I thought you—”

“No, I don’t mean—“ He darts his tongue over his lips then turns on the pillow to face McCoy. “I love you, you know? But my brain is my brain, and I can’t help but—”

The breath whooshes out of McCoy on a choked laugh, cutting off Jim mid-sentence. The kid’s eyebrows pull together, and McCoy can’t help but lean over to kiss the corner of his mouth. Then the other corner. He almost kisses the tip of his nose, but thinks better of it at the last second. He’s already been called girly once today.

He clears his throat, tries to man up. “You think I’ll be offended by you daydreaming about—Let’s see, what’s one of your charming expressions? Coming all over Uhura’s tits?”

Jim lets out a surprised noise. “Well… yes?”

“Boy, please. I’m not dumb. I know you. I’ve been inside your head, remember?”

“Among other things. Cha-ching.”

McCoy spreads his hand over Jim’s face and pushes. “Shut the hell up. I’m trying to say something you apparently need to hear.”

Jim bats his hand away, then captures it and curls them both under his chin. “Yes, sir.” His eyes don’t stop twinkling, but he does stop talking. For once.

“Point is, Jim Kirk likes sex. I know this, and I happen to like Jim Kirk just fine the way he is. My only requirement is that Jim Kirk have that sex with me and only me.”

“I already told you, I understand that, and it’ll be fine, I’m sure—”

McCoy grabs him by scruff of the neck and kisses him roughly. “You bet your bippy it will. And I don’t think you _do_ understand. You think we’ve had a good run today? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Joanna being an only child was _not_ for lack of trying.”

The worry lines that Jim would never admit to start to dissipate. “Yeah?”

“And as I think I’ve demonstrated sufficiently today—“ He kisses a light path down Jim’s jaw, which tilts towards him so very accommodatingly. “—you should count me in on just about anything you can think of.” Jim makes a noise of surprised approval, and McCoy smiles against his skin. “So long as I can fix anything that’s broken or torn afterwards,” he amends. “I’m still a doctor, after all.”

“Thank God for that,” Jim says, his voice slightly liquefied. Apparently satisfied with the conversation, he puts his head down and pushes into McCoy’s side, snuffling around until he’s found a spot he likes. So like a puppy, and proving himself to be a cuddler outside as well as inside his own head. McCoy’s mostly alright with it. Hell, who’s he kidding? He’s totally alright with it. It’s _Jim_. And the late hour is starting to press down on them in the form of post-coital exhaustion.

He can’t let the topic die quite yet, though. “Might I give one suggestion?”

“’course,” Jim yawns.

“Share.”

“What?” He’s confused enough to squinch open his eyes at the doctor.

McCoy turns in to Jim so his mouth is right next to his ear. “I want to hear about those impure thoughts of yours. Preferably while your legs are wrapped around me, but during dinner would be fine, too. Or meetings. Or on boring away missions. Or—” But Jim's kiss has cut him off. Just like he planned.

It’s that lazy kiss, McCoy recognizes with a flash. The one from the imagined frolic Jim’s mind set in this very room. And it’s just as brilliant as he’d expected it to be.

Once they’ve come up for air, Jim goes to settle back down but McCoy doesn’t follow. “C’mon, Bones,” he says cajolingly, “isn’t it time to sleep?”

McCoy raises an eyebrow, then exhales slowly. “Listen, kid. Every day, I have this list. Things I need to do, mostly, although there are always a few things I need to _not_ do. And if I haven’t dealt with that list, I can’t sleep. And that’s just how I am.”

Jim looks at him for a moment, then his expression softens. “Fine. What is it today, then, that didn’t get done? Let’s see…” He mimes making a list and checking it twice. There’s a smirk on his face that McCoy doesn’t trust one bit. “Declare undying love to Jim Kirk. Check. Suck Jim Kirk’s cock. Check. Fuck the living daylights out of Jim Kirk. Checkity-check-check.”

“I still maintain you made the first move, you oversexed blowhole.”

“Fine, whatever.” He pulls McCoy’s chin so they make eye contact, and the doctor sees he’s totally serious. “So what the hell is it?”

“We should probably get up early to catch a good shuttle.”

“Hmm. Yeah, I’m not buying that.”

McCoy huffs. “It’s on the list.”

“Okay, but it would not keep you from sleeping. So: What is it?”

McCoy sighs, tries not to fidget. “Do we tell Jo tomorrow?”

Kirk doesn’t even think about it. “We’ll have to. Otherwise she’ll be kinda surprised when your justice-of-the-peace-cousin declares us legally bound for life.”

McCoy’s heart flops over in a hurry, and for a second he can’t remember what they were talking about in the first place. “You—“ He has to clear his throat. “You want her to be there?”

Jim’s eyebrows go up. “I want the fucking galaxy to be there. But I know you’d just grumble about how it’s nobody’s business but ours, so I figured I’d just ask for Jo and the bridge crew and maybe bat my eyelashes and you’d give in?”

He begins to do exactly that, but McCoy captures his lips in a kiss before it gets any more ridiculous. If that’s possible. “Yeah, sure, kid. I suppose I’ll let them come.” He winces. “I should invite Jocelyn and Mr Jocelyn, too. They invited me to their ridiculous cream puff of a wedding.” _Everything_ had seemed cream-puff inspired, from her dress to the table decorations to the insipid music during the reception. A thorough nightmare.

“Oh, hell,” Jim grumbles. “All right.” Then he chuckles. “Jo’s going to have, like, half a dozen parents.”

“Two and two makes four, Jim, and for heaven’s sake, she’s almost a teenager. That’s probably not _enough_ of a cavalry.” The thought brings him up short. He buries his face in his hands. “Sweet mother of mercy.”

“Hey, she’ll be fine. Jocelyn, as much as I hate to admit it, is a fine woman these days, and Jo’s your kid, so how bad can she turn out?”

The glare McCoy shoots at him would kill a lesser man, but it just bounces off Jim Kirk. The little shit is snuggling back down into McCoy’s side already. The doctor lets him settle, then thinks better of it. He’s not ready to sleep quite yet. “Should we go tell Jarod? I think he’ll be thoroughly disappointed he didn’t get to have a go with you.”

Kirk flings a hand up to smack McCoy on whatever bit he can reach. “Tomorrow, you smug bastard. Sleep now.”

“Now, Jim, don’t tell me the old man wore you out?” He prods Jim’s shoulder. “And here all I had left on my list was to tell you some of the other choice things I saw while I had the damn curse.” One blue eye opens to peer at him. “You know, Sulu is quite a flexible lad…”

Jim practically springs out of his supine position, rolling McCoy right over and pushing him into the mattress. “That was sneaky and underhanded, old man.” He kisses him thoroughly, lining up their bodies to start a rut of delicious friction, and McCoy feels pleasure shooting through him like a rocket. “But I’m awake now. So it’s time to start sharing.”

\---

 _Day Ten_

They don’t make it down to breakfast the next day. They do manage to catch a semi-early shuttle, though. And when they tell Joanna that afternoon, the first thing out of her mouth is, ‘Way to go, Dad! He’s _totally_ just as hot as he was in the magazine!”

 _  
**FIN**   
_

**Author's Note:**

>  **Credit where credit is due** : _High Fidelity_ , Dr Seuss, ‘Hand Me Downs’, _The X-Files_ episode 3x13 ‘Syzygy’  & movie _Fight the Future_ , my BFF Brita, [‘Sunday Morning’](http://www.box.net/shared/kbll94gb1u), ZQMF, [_Two Men & a Motorcycle_](http://inell.livejournal.com/729550.html#cutid1), _Pirates of the Caribbean_ , _When Harry Met Sally..._ , Isaiah 40:4 (‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.’) as presented in Handel’s _Messiah_ , [ some amazing smutty art](http://community.livejournal.com/st_fanart_meme/282.html?thread=2842#t2842), a half-dozen episodes of _Sports Night_ , _Dogma_ , Chris Pine’s personal tics, my job & the anatomy/physiology textbook it made me read, [sex-lexis.com](http://www.sex-lexis.com/Sex-Dictionary/intracrural%20intercourse) & [catwalksalone](http://catwalksalone.livejournal.com)’s sexual tactics (srsly, I’m-a start a fanclub), my mother’s acquired southern colloquialisms, _Foxfire_ , that chick at Toys in Babeland all those years ago, and, of course, [ontd_startrek](http://ontd-startrek.livejournal.com).
> 
>  **Thanks where thanks are due** (or: where the author proves that anything worth doing is a team effort): First off, thank you so much to Anon for such a _perfect_ [prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/st_xi_kink/1886.html?thread=3745374#t3745374). (My favorite part was ‘And then sex.’ LOLOL.) Thank you to my unflappable betas, [abigail89](http://abigail89.livejournal.com) and [raphaellover](http://raphaellover.livejournal.com), who were in it for the long haul and did brilliantly. Thank you to my f’list for putting up with this nonsense, especially a few: sunnyrea, who made me laugh until I cried when she christened it with the Alternate Titles _The Little Fic THAT WOULD NOT QUIT_ and _The Fic in Which McCoy Tried to Kill the Author_ , and helped me with SCIENCE despite my inability to press the right button in gmail, lord_colin for help with the personality quirks of our favorite country doctor (I know, there probably wasn’t enough avalanche, but I couldn’t resist the schmoop), lindmere for the mindblowing technobabble, eowyn42 for the _perfect_ help with the title, and starsfell for supporting me  & cheerleading me & betaing for me.
> 
> And _most importantly_ , **thank you to all of you!** For reading! For writing! For being such an amazing, friendly, enthusiastic bunch of GQMFs! I welcome love, concrit, outright flames, corrections of typos, canon, and science (no joke! I can take it!), friend requests, seduction attempts, discussions about the status of homosexuality in the ‘verse (because boy, are there a _lot_ of interpretations), and/or GQMF macros.  <3 Peace OUT.


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